User blog comment:3primetime3/Guess the object!/@comment-27403314-20140610085928/@comment-4189499-20140610102805

It's not that those French words don't have gender when preceded by "les", just that they are in the plural form and the gender can't be found from the article (or whatever the "the" equivalent is called). But trust me, those words still have genders, and you still need to know them for adjective agreements. I've been told off about using the wrong gender agreements often enough to know that!

But the problem with using gender in this case is that English doesn't use genders for non-living things, and different languages assign different genders to other nouns, eg while the French might think one thing was feminine, the Germans might think that same object was masculine. Doesn't narrow it down, sadly.