I'm sorry to inform you that it basically is not related to human gender at all. It is a grammatical category, not a semantic one. We call them gender because in the European languages that early linguists were going off of, words either fell in the group that men or women (or neuter) also fell into. And it's true that the words in those categories have "gender" (in the sense that they share that grammatical grouping) the objects they refer to are emphatically not gendered. Case in point: the French word for vagina is in the masculine noun class. Does that mean French speakers view vaginas as a masculine body part? No. It's literally just a grammatical structure.

English speakers have it all fucked up because we only have gender on personal pronouns. Other than pronouns, English words have lost noun classes (and conjugation). For us, the very few words with gender always have a referent that matches that gender. That's an artifact of the streamlining of English morphology. It tells us nothing about how grammatical gender operates in Romance languages.