It's not about male or female people, but about a linguistic feature where certain words are syntactically "masculine" or "feminine". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Correlation...

I meant an extreme form of gender-neutral planned language.

Another reason might be that "Die" clashes with the English verb "to die".

Those people who want this "gender neutral" speak really can't be pleased. Consider for example this case (in German, sorry) > http://www.danisch.de/blog/2013/03/14/zwangsverblodung-im-so... where some female professor for gender studies complains that the neutral article "das" is used for "Mädchen" ("das Mächen" - "the girl"), because this way girls are degraded to objects. For science: the grammatical reason "Mächen" is neuter is because it is the minimization of the outdated noun "Maid".