Dear friend,
What we actually have here is a language problem, not a gender problem.
God does not have a body, the way people do, so God doens't have a gender. The prayer books and the TaNaKh reflect the fact that people use language to speak, and many languages are strongly gendered. English, unusually, is not a strongly gendered language, but Hebrew is, and both our prayer books and the TaNaKh reflect that they are translated from Hebrew - in which not only God gets a gender, but so do chairs, tables, body parts, food, pencils... you get the idea: everything in Hebrew is a "he" or "she" for the purposes of speaking, even though that's rather silly when you think about it. Hebrew, however, has no "it," so our choices are to either choose a gender to label God, or call God "God" everytime we refer to God.
Some people do this (I do it myself, sometimes, when I talk about God in English). It can be a bit clunky, though.
Sometimes, in English, I refer to God as "She." Many people find this a little shocking the first time that they hear it because they're not used to it. Sometimes, I alternate back and forth between "He" and "She" - I don't use "It" for God, even though it might be more accurate, because in English, "It" usually denotes something inanimate - a thing, like a chair- which would be disrespectful to God.
The great commentator Maimonides wrote that when we talk about God we have a problem, because our minds and languges are human, and thus limited. We, with our puny human brains, don't really understand God, so the best we could accurately do would be to say what God is not. So, for example, when we say that God is compassionate, what we really mean is that our limits allow us to understand that God is not cruel.
Our language is limited the same way: we may know that God isn't human, but we have trouble understnding it, so when we talk about God, we say "He" or "She," but the reality of God has nothing to do with being male or female - or any other characteristic of our limited human physical existence.
Answered by: Rabbi Alana Suskin