There is no “lei” because people are not gender neutral. You can pretty much tell from context and when you can’t, you ask their preferred; or you guess. I usually base my guess on body size and hair length but that doesn’t work on black people in my experience so with them I usually assume female cause (again just /my/ experience) if you call a black man by a female pronoun they tend to either not care and roll with it or they let you know politely “I’m a man” but if you call a black woman sir she will flip tf out on you)
Second question. The one about aspirin fixing tons of stuff. It is actually a vasoconstrictor which helps soothe headache and reduce fever which is pretty much the majority of the illness in America until you get the big stuff. We don’t have many middle of the road illnesses. It’s basically nothing just ignore it or GET TO EMERGENCY ROOM NOW! Type stuff here. And the tiny stuff aspirin fixes.
Wait that’s not what they meant with the ‘Lei’ question. It has zero to do with gender. You use it with both male and female, the discriminant is social status/age/degree of knowledge. It’s like the french ‘Vous’, it’s a formal pronoun used to address people with respect. It’s actually extremely disrespectful for us to use the ‘tu’ instead of the ‘lei’ when you don’t know them, which was the question that was posed in the video, the gifs are not complete, the question in the video was “why don’t you have the ‘lei’? who gave you this much familiarity?” here a vague explaination
Fun fact: during the fascism Mussolini actually tried to suppress the usage of ‘lei’ substituiting it with the ‘voi’ that was used in southern italy (still in use) actually because of the gender implication. (can’t use the female pronoun to address people with respect, can’t we? *sarcasm*). Many bureaucratic problems ensued.
A Middleground 