That one case isn't inherent to the language, but i think it is a property of English that you can selectively apply gendered pronouns to otherwise non-gendered things and people can understand when you do it. Like if I started calling planet Earth "she" or a big tall tree "he" people aren't gonna stop me and ask why I'm speaking so strangely.

Some languages have animacy as a semantic feature, designating if something is alive/animate or not, and breaking animacy in English is done through gendered pronouns usually. It's done differently in other languages, like the Sinhala language in Sri Lanka has two completely different verbs for "to be" if something is alive or not.