The oddest pronoun debate that I had was with a former friend who decided to go on a rant against me for referring to Israel as 'she' and 'her'.
The weirdest thing should have been that my post should have offended his Jew-hating ass a lot more than me using those pronouns; but, he (I don't know...maybe he identifies as a carrot now), specifically decided to zero in on the pronouns.
I think that I explained, fairly correctly and cordially that I wasn't doing anything new in the context of Western languages
We refer to ships as "she" all the fucking time.
We use terms like "the mother land" all the fucking time.
Germans tend to err toward the masculine, and refer to Germany as "the father land." I respect those pronouns; and, in the rare case that I need a pronoun to refer to Germany, I use "him/his."
Most Western languages don't, and haven't had gender neutral pronouns in more than a millennium.
Hell, it's not even just Western languages. Russian operates in a more gender-binary way than English.
One of my best friends in the whole world is Israeli who speaks near perfect English; but, it took me a while to process why he was referring to something like a GPS as "she" rather than "it." It's because Hebrew doesn't have the "it" pronoun.
Everything is either a masculine or feminine, even if you're referring to a table.
This really shouldn't be a problem.
If you're gonna be woke, and sensitive, and multicultural, and all that jazz, shouldn't that come with a certain respect for the languages that a large part of the world grew up with?