Granted of course; I took the piece to be refering to the former, in languages such as English, where gender is only assigned to things that actually have it (leading of course to problems, exceptions and woolly lines, but still competely different from the use of gender in languages such as French).

But since its unclear wtf the piece is really saying I may be wrong (though it's clearly untrue to say that the gender that French assigns objects expresses something in reality so would then be baffled as to what its point is).