: There's a difference between using gendered pronouns for rhetorical
: convenience, and things actually having a sex. I can refer to my car as
: "she" but that doesn't mean it's legally a person. Similarly, if
: Frankie wants to dupe people and keep things under wraps, saying the
: character isn't -technically- a girl is a great and easy technicality to
: exploit. No one's going to remember his post in 1.5 years anyway.

Cars, ships, and aircraft aren't developed with the capacity for its own personality in mind. The creators of these constructs had the idea from the onset to give these beings the ability to form their own identity and personality.

"Sex" is a biological term to describe something's genitalia and its processes. You don't interface with sex on a regular basis. You are introduced and continue to interact with a person based on their presentation to the world which includes gender, personality, behavior, clothing/jewelry/decoration, or the lack thereof. Gender is something that can be determined by forces of nature at birth in a cis, trans, etc. capacity, but also something that can be developed upon otherwise as a force of our species' mental abilities.

Had Frankie stated or implied that Cortana wasn't "technically a girl", that would not only a slap in the face to quite a lot of people, including myself, but would denounce the abilities of artificial intelligence constructs and insist that they are mere creations of our will without the capacity for self-determination.