It's true that gender issues are not even something that is talked about currently in Russia. But I'm just using the example from OP post to talk about linguistic features here. For me and I think most English speaking folk it might sound confusing whether Spanish grammatical gender implies person's gender and threw example in Russian where it doesn't have to - I can talk about you in male, female, or neutral gender. It only depends on which words I use and which endings they have.