The article addresses the relation between the grammatical gender and the linguistic encoding of sex distinction (natural gender). Our goal is to problematize the category of gender as a multipart and multifunctional linguistic phenomenon operating in diverse dimensions of a language. The analysis of Italian and Polish languages illustrates that grammatical gender – whose main function is to signal syntactic relations between text constituents – and natural gender – whose main function is to encode information about the sex of a referent – are in principle autonomous and independent linguistic phenomena which are however strongly interrelated in a linguistic system through a morphological and syntactic interface.