It is commonly believed that early Proto-Indo-European (PIE) had only two noun classes, animate and inanimate. PIE used demonstrative pronouns as third-person pronouns, which in practice means that early PIE did not distinguish between an equivalent to "he" or "she", but rather used the word *só for referents of all genders. Later stages of PIE would innovate a feminine gender, adding the feminine suffix *-h₂ to *só to create feminine *seh₂. This left the animate gender to become the masculine and the inanimate gender as the neuter.

According to some theories, the Anatolian languages split off from PIE before the development of the feminine had happened or finished, and this is why Anatolian languages such as Hittite have only an animate-inanimate distinction rather than a masculine-feminine distinction.

On the subject of gender-neutral pronouns, I always found the "I won't call you a 'they' because it's not grammatically correct for me to do so!" argument weird for two reasons:

• 1. Obviously, that take is literally false. We, as a society, use "they" and "them" as singular pronouns in the case of ambiguous and unknown gender very frequently.
• 2. Even if it, in some sense, were true, language is not and doesn't have to be set in stone, so there's no real reason why we can't evolve language to make they/them pronouns singular at the point of needing to do so to accommodate broader acceptance of genderqueer identity.

As any other form of bigoted rhetoric goes, it serves as a lousy excuse to justify treating certain groups of people like shit just because they deviate from the norm. It's the same shit as the nonsensical "Being gay is a choice!" rhetoric that theocratic conservatives abused in the past, a time when gay people were a more socially acceptable target. The two aforementioned points are mirrored here:

• 1. It's false.
• 2. Even if it were true, it still wouldn't make homophobia a good thing.

great post, thank you comrade