When English had genders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Determiners

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English

Decline of grammatical gender

While inflectional reduction seems to have been incipient in the English language itself, some theories suggest that it was accelerated by contact with Old Norse, especially in northern and midland dialects.[3] This correlates with the geographical extent of the Viking Danelaw in the late 9th and early 10th centuries; for almost a century Norse constituted a prestige language with regard to the southern Northumbrian and east Mercian dialects of Old English.

By the 11th century, the role of grammatical gender in Old English was beginning to decline.[4] The Middle English of the 13th century was in transition to the loss of a gender system.[5][6] One element of this process was the change in the functions of the words the and that (then spelt þe and þat; see also Old English determiners): previously these had been non-neuter and neuter forms respectively of a single determiner, but in this period the came to be used generally as a definite article and that as a demonstrative; both thus ceased to manifest any gender differentiation.[7] The loss of gender classes was part of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century.[8]

Gender loss began in the north of England; the south-east and the south-west Midlands were the most linguistically conservative regions, and Kent retained traces of gender in the 1340s.[5] Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender,[5] and Modern English retains no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender.[8]

War also eine Entwicklung "von unten" und nicht der krampfhafte Versuch der Obrigkeit, dem "Volk das Maul zu verbiegen", wie Luther es wohl so schön bildhaft ausgedrückt hätte...

Und für die Lesefaulen das ganze mal auf youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaVI-IStNE

Den Kanal kann ich übrigens grundsätzlich empfehlen, wenn man sich für die Sprache interessiert!