Quote:
I have read somewhere, I forget where, that English used to have gender.

Well, that's from the time when English used to be a Germanic language

For an opposite example, in Finnish, you can have a rather long conversation about a third person without revealing the gender of the person - instead of "He", "She" and "It", Finnish has "Hän" (He/She) and "Se" (It). I think the same applies for Estonian.