In Chinese, the first-person masculine and feminine pronouns are homophones. My teacher told me the he/she written forms were only introduced upon contact with Western languages. It's not uncommon for native Chinese speakers to mis-gender their family members when speaking English, since to (most of?) them, there's only a grammatical distinction when writing.

In college, I took a course on Chinese literature, translated into English. A couple of the stories relied on a plot twist regarding the gender of one of the main characters. Unfortunately, the plot was given away early in both because it was obvious the translator was going through great pains to avoid gendered pronouns in English.