It is rare that these issues come up in English, where, with rare exceptions, nouns for inanimate objects take the neuter pronoun. One exception which comes to mind is a ship, which properly takes the feminine pronoun.
Interestingly, people who ought to know better sometimes have trouble with the notion that a “thing” can be other than neuter. A while back, the New York Times ran an article in which it (incorrectly) referred to a ship as “it.” I was so offended that I wrote to the editor, who informed me that the Times style manual requires the neuter pronoun in such a case. What was interesting was his explanation for the reason behind their “rule”: a ship is inanimate, he explained, and therefore per se neuter. The idea that an inanimate object could take other than a neuter pronoun, which is a common feature of many languages, was so foreign to a (presumably literate) English-speaker that he could not accept it even in one of the rare cases where it is correct.
Robert Rothman