I was recently in France and was told by a local this was actually an issue with the covid outbreak. There is a department that decides on the gender of new words and they determined covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.

Presumably, the folk at the Académie Française¹.

Every couple of years they release a statement that causes a flurry of changes in the documentation of a few projects I've worked on. Always in really curious ways too, exchanging words that are common to French people in our industry with words uncommon to everyone.

I kind of appreciate the quirkiness of the whole thing.

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_Française

> There is a department that decides on the gender of new words

TIL. Fascinating.

> covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.

And here I was hoping that I was being too pessamistic.

Gramatical gender has very little to do with the words it describes. For example, in a particularly confusing twist: féminisme (feminism) is a masculine noun, wheras masculinité (masculinity) is feminine.

It's mostly due to the pronunciation and spelling of the word ending. Although in this case, the Académie Française decided feminine because COVID is an acronym, and the last word of that acronym is disease, and disease is a feminine word (la Maladie) because of how it is spelled.

The issue with Covid is that we all started to say LE covid for a few months until June/July or so, maybe because we say LE coronavirus, and then they come and tell us we must say LA Covid.

It's not that we gender everything, I am Italian and my language does not have the neutral pronoun. Everything is either masculine or feminine.