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Raemon comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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I wasn't really sure how to word that sentence to strike the right emotional note (I've changed it a little, hopefully for the better).
I think it's legitimate to argue "you should not make assumptions about gender until you have some actual evidence to go on. " I don't think it's legitimate to argue "my name relates to unicorns therefore you should assume I'm a girl." Either people associate the word alicorn with femininity or they don't. And since this issue has come up multiple times, apparently enough people don't make that association that it's an issue.
I also don't think the world would be a better place if more people DID think Alicorn was a girly name. My favorite game is Robot Unicorn Attack. I've considered buying Invisible Pink Unicorn Merchandise. I don't feel a need to associate my identity with it, but I think it'd be a better world if preference for unicorns didn't signal gender or sexuality at all.
You'd better not move to Germany. Chairs have a masculine sexual identity.
Slavic languages also assign a grammatical gender to every noun, and there's nothing sexual about it. (I certainly find nothing sexual about stars, books, rivers, or mathematics being feminine.) Even for nouns that denote humans and other living creatures with biological sex, the correlation between grammatical gender and biological sex is high but still not perfect.
The gender defaults are mostly masculine (though with some exceptions), and it would be impossible to change that without rewriting the grammar of the language altogether, which is why the entire business over gender-neutral language in English has always seemed absurd to me. On the upside, it's almost impossible to speak without revealing whether you're male or female, since you have to refer to your attributes and actions using adjectives and even verbs inflected for gender, so confusions of this sort are almost impossible (however this can make it impossible to translate literature where a character's sex is supposed to be hidden).
And maidens are neutral. Which suggests to me that grammatical gender in German has much less to do with personal gender than it does in English.
IIRC, Germans, Italians, &c. will describe the same objects differently based on the grammatical gender of the word describing it; i.e., speakers of a language in which "bridge" is masculine will emphasize a bridge's strength and stability vs beauty and grace, and visa versa, &c. So gender in the wider sense interacts with it somewhat.
On a lighter note, Mark Twain had a typically great passage which he claimed to be a literal translation of a German story, the main humor being that various inanimate objects are referred to as hes and shes while the hapless fishwife has to get by on its.
The "bridge" study was by Lera Boroditsky, as discussed here. Her papers are available here - it looks like the most relevant is:
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Gentner & Goldin-Meadow (Eds.,) Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Cognition.