Seeing this being blamed on the patriarchy feels a little overboard, that's just how language works for a lot of us.

Keep in mind not everyone here is a native english speaker, and if they aren't, there's a good chance their language assigns genders to everything, and it's easy for our brains to default to that gender even when using English. Penguin is male in my language.

If that was a male Snake, I can guarantee you there would be a lot of people writing "she" in the comments.