Your point is unclear to me. Gender doesn't mean genre in contemporary English. And context is enough to distinguish grammatical gender from other meanings usually.
Nouns that describe persons with social genders have matching grammatical genders usually. And you have to distinguish when talking about both at once obviously.
> And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
still, the grammatical sense predates the sex sense by a bit, and has always been around to mean “genre”. So you always have to disambiguate usage