I used to be fluent in French, and my wife is from Sud America so I am well aware of the Spanish usage. But we're not talking about Spanish here, we're talking about English. And, even if we were talking about Spanish, first of all the word "guy" is a noun, not a pronoun. Secondly, a women's basketball team doesn't (by definition) include any male players, so if it were being discussed in Spanish the speaker would not use "ellos" but "ellas."
Hawkmoon, my point is that the gender of an object in its language has no bearing on the masculinity/femininity of the object.
"La verga," for instance, is a perfectly manly and virile slang term for male genitalia, despite its feminine object label. Maricon or puto are both masculine objects, but mean sissy or queer. A slang term for semen commonly used is "la leche" (milk). Fertility is a big thing in Mexican culture, but when boasting of virility they will talk big about verga and leche.
It's extraordinarily common for a word to simply have an assigned gender, regardless of the gender of the person bearing that title, or the perceived "manliness/girliness" of the object. Comandante, for example, is masculine... even if a woman is a comandante.
This is true across all the latin/romantic languages. I've found Japanese and Mandarin Chinese to be more social heirarchy-focused than gender-focused when referring to objects, and there isn't much gender reference except against living creatures. I assume most asian languages will conform more closely to the Mandarin model on which most of them relate, not unlike the romantics relating to Latin. But I believe that most of the languages in the world operate with some sort of awareness of implied gender of many objects. Arabic has sun and moon letters, and gender of nouns... in Arabic a flower is feminine in all sentences that will refer to it, even if the flower has stamen only and no female reproductive components. In English, many objects have implied genders. Ships come to mind in particular, but there's implied assumptions when encountering other objects.
But "Comandante" fits this argument perfectly. Regardless of the lactating capabilities of the breasts being referred to as "comandante," it is still going to be written in the ship's logs that "El comandante ha dicho que el barque tiene que navigar a Mexico." The commander has dictated that the ship must navigate to Mexico.
In the Starfleet utopian universe, you can either have alien species attempting to ogle all the crewmembers and being paranoid about whom to refer to as sir or ma'am, trying to keep tabs on which alien species have breast-like structures on the torso of their females, or which male species have reproductive organs on their knees, ad nauseum, or you can simply respect the role and give it an implied genderless shorthand title that will work for all instances. While English has unisex definite and indefinite articles ("the" and "a/an"), it does not have unisex suffixes to replace lay titles (sir, madam, mister, miss) and it lacks any capability to truncate more formal titles (doctor, professor, captain, lieutenant, etc).
It's either have interspecies boob-gazing, or get over the gender crap and accept the respect for the role in a quick "sir" while moving on with the real problems. As evidenced by 100+ years of Trek lore, up until Janeway opens her yap.
