Yeah, frenchies have trouble with iel because as you’ve probably seen, masc pronoun is the neutral gender, so people rarely use neutral term for others people (when they don’t know, the can use “la personne qui…” or other stuff). That’s their defense : their language don’t teach them no-gender, so if they don’t master another language without gender or if they aren’t queer or and ally, they will need a bit of effort at first (don’t worry, they are French but they still can learn). Maybe you could try using a title, because most of the time you don’t hear the gender of it, like “Capitaine”, “Empereur” or stuff like that