>As a French, the construction comes naturally because we've been taught that at school since kindergarten. This always sounded a bit weird, though.

If you follow the grammatical history of French, the neutral gender just got folded into masculine.

>but some innovative-but-not-distruptive changes would be welcome

You can't really produce grammar by decree, at best you can systematize what already exists. The only "sane" way to have explicit neutral in French would be to go back in time, reimplement declensions and possibly mangle phonology in the process. That won't happen. All forms of "inclusive writing" are from the outset destined and meant to be an elitist signal rather than an actual linguistic feature. They won't survive and they'll been seen in the future as a strange, idiosyncratic trend of the age. A bit like Renaissance orthography, where countless letters were added without meaning to simply look fancier.

> If you follow the grammatical history of French, the neutral gender just got folded into masculine.

This is not just grammatical history, this is the current grammar rules.

However some people are trying to force a change of the rule by making up new words and rules, such as "iels" instead of "ils/elles".

Like I said, I do not approve of the horrible ideas we have, with dots everywhere - this transforms words that are fine as they are. I am for simplification, though (nothing to do with the current topic, just a thought).

What I am missing are the concepts young people are bringing in more and more, where they have words that become unisex (potes for instance). I listen to my children and (without any scientific analysis), it sounds to me that there is less of a boy/girl cut that there was in my times (this may be regional - this is for west of Paris).

And I agree with you that only naturally appearing changes will stay, not the ones forced on us. A typical example are the surrealist ideas of the 90's to have French equivalents for everything computer. Some stayed, the majority is now part of comedies.

German is also developing (unofficial) gender-neutral nouns using an asterisk ending but I think it’s also an open discussion about how best to handle it. It’s mostly often seen when referring to a person’s role, position or job in a way that includes all genders and non-binary people. I speak the language but it’s not my mother tongue so native German speakers might explain it better.

There's two types of gender-neutral nouns in German being used:

- apprehending markers like -*in, -_in, -In [1]

- forming a gerund from a verb describing the activity

e.g. the word "Bäcker" - engl. "baker" - could be written as "Bäcker*in" or "Backende" (from "backen", the verb), depending on the speaker. Note that the gerund form eliminates conveying info about gender, unlike an "universal" marker like *in.

[1] for plural forms, those are expanded to -*innen, -_innen and -Innen

As in things like ~fireman~ -> fire*? How do you pronounce it?

Basically you take the word stem, add the asterisk and then append the female ending, you pronounce it by putting a stop where the * is and then saying the feminine ending (at least that’s how I’ve seen it done). This probably wouldn’t work in French since they hate putting stops anywhere :)

Some info and alternatives here https://www.goethe.de/ins/th/en/m/spr/mag/21967217.html

The thing is, since we don't have a separate neutral in French, masculine is also used for neutral. Which means it isn't that weird when we use masculine for groups with women, as we also use genders for everyday objects. A desk is masculine for some reason, and a table feminine.

Well, to me saying "ils sont là!" when there is a crowd of 200 girls and one boy is still weird :) I would probably say "elles sont là!" despite it not being grammatical.

As for the genders of nouns, my native English French speaking friends are usually in pain.

I feel the same, and I think it's fair to switch to feminine in these cases. My point was just that it sounds a bit less weird than saying "elles sont là" when there is 200 girls and a boy.