Only living things can have more than one gender and in that case, not only does the article change, but so does the suffix. There is no "singress" in English, only "singer", but in German there's "der Sänger" or "die Sängerin". Calling a female singer "der Sänger" would be grammatically-speaking completely incorrect.
The only thing that changed fairly recently is that more and more people intentionally try to maintain gender ambiguity when they don't intent to specify a gender, in which case "the singer" becomes "die Sänger:in", or even "der:die Sänger:in" if you want to be even more pedantic.
> The only thing that changed fairly recently is that more and more people intentionally try to maintain gender ambiguity when they don't intent to specify a gender, in which case "the singer" becomes "die Sänger:in", or even "der:die Sänger:in" if you want to be even more pedantic.
Here is my point: in English, the move to gender neutrality of certain words (e.g. actor/actress) seems to have involved adopting the male version, and using it as neutral. (I don't know if some people are offended by this, but if they are, I've not come across it).
In contrast, in German, I impute that some people would be offended by using the male version of a word as a default neutral for all including women, so are deliberately maintaining the female version within the slightly awkward "Sänger:in" construct.
This is a strong, deliberate choice, in contrast to (what I see as) the more passive "eh, let's just use 'actor'" in English.