It’s probably worth noting that English and some, but not all, other human languages have a sex-gender bias that ignores that we are not talking about Klingon grammatical gender. We are talking about Klingon words that do or do not differentiate between the sexes. Gender, in Klingon, is never sex related.
Gender in Klingon separates beings capable of language, body parts, and everything else. There’s nothing there about males or females. That’s grammatical gender.
The difference is between grammatical gender, which is a system of classifying nouns according to how they agree with other grammatical aspects of the language, and natural gender, which is classifying nouns according to characteristics of the referent. Natural gender can be sex-based, or it can be based on something else. Animate/inanimate is one alternative.
Klingon seems to have a system of noun genders, but it's not a
slam dunk to say that this is the case. For one thing, the alleged
genders have minimal interaction with other areas of grammar:
aside from needing to use the correct plural suffix, the only
effects of gender are to connote that a noun is "scattered all
about" and to be insulting if you refer to a being capable of
using language as something that isn't capable of it. For another,
the choice of plural suffix doesn't usually seem tied to the noun
itself but the context in which the noun is used: Klingon have to
think about whether to use -pu' or -mey when
referring to speaking robots and birds. So while I will sometimes
casually call this gender in Klingon, it's not necessarily quite
so straightforward as that. Noun classes are not automatically
genders.
In English, gender separated males, females, and neuters (everything else).
In French, gender separates males and females, and arbitrarily assigns male and female grammatical gender to everything English would call neuter. A lot of languages do that.
Again, it's not that straightforward. Old English had grammatical
gender, but during Middle English it mostly dropped away. There
are still vestiges, though. Many words related to natural gender
remain, and sometimes those still possess some grammatical gender.
Dictionaries will still tell you to use blonde to refer to
girls or women and blond as a more general term. Ships and
countries are sometimes referred to as she and her.
And the grammatical gender of Old English didn't always match
grammatical and natural gender. It had, for instance, words
meaning wife in all three of its gender categories.
Grammatical gender is just an arbitrary way of grouping nouns that may or may not have anything to do with males, females, and neuter things or beings.
This bias toward sex-gender links is at the root of this discussion, since we are basically asking the question as to whether the English glosses, which have sexual gender, carry that sex-related meaning with it to the Klingon word it is linked to, even though, so far as we know, Klingons just don’t habitually consider sex gender as automatically as we do, every time we parse every single noun we ever use. For us, it is essential. For them, it’s probably, “Meh.”
But it's not essential for us. We have tons of words that aren't
given a natural gender and can't be forced into one. Farmer,
captain, baby, hippie, teacher.
So, through our language, we are constantly asking ourselves about every noun, “Could I have sex with this?” while Klingons are asking, “Can this thing talk to me, or could I lose it in a battle or eat it if I kill the thing it’s attached to?"
No we don't. Grammatical gender is not about sex, and natural
gender based on sex only applies to those nouns whose referents
exhibit sexual characteristics. We call dogs and cats he, she,
or it depending on the characteristics of the animals and
our relationships with them, not based on whether they are
sexually compatible with us. Some people will even switch between
he/she and it based on how personal they need to be
in the given situation. I find it very normal to refer to pets of
known sex as he or she, while pets of unknown sex
are it, but human beings of known sex (or sexual
preference) are he or she, while those of unknown
sex or preference are they, never it. A pet of
unknown sex is never they.
Similarly, I seriously doubt Klingons base their noun classes
around concern about how the noun interacts with themselves. Noun
classes are just built into the language. The plural of targh
is targhmey, not because I can't have a conversation with
it, but because that's how you make the plural of things not
capable of language.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name