Hi Simon,
As a native English speaker, allow me to say that the examples you have
given are not grammatical gender but literary. English does not have such a
thing. Since there are no gendered definite or indefinite articles ('the',
'a') there is just no such concept in English grammar.
Often people refer to boats as 'she', but that's not a part of grammar. As
for 'grammatic gender of death' - it's pure tosh, I am sorry. For a start,
death cannot have a gender as it is an abstract noun. Any such description
is purely literary. As an aside, although 'grammatic' is considered to be
in current use, most people now would use the form 'grammatical', the most
recent example of use in the Oxford English Dictionary II being 1889. [But
I have no objection to using older and obsolete words - in fact, I love it!]