You don't gave a word for "it" in French because the concept of a non-gendered noun does not exist in French (as far as I know). When you use a pronoun in place of a noun in French, the noun it references is gendered. Nouns in English are not gendered, so we don't have distinctly masculine or feminine pronouns. The word "it" is simply a pronoun which refers to an object without a gender. The case of referring to a cat is a little more confusing because the cat is in fact either male or female. That is, the cat does have a sex, and English speakers might sometimes personify the cat by associating the cat's sex with a gender. Instead of saying, "It is cute," then, we might instead say, "He is cute," if the cat is male or, "She is cute," if the cat is female. This is obviously exactly the same as using "il" or "elle" in French. In the case of saying, "It is cute," though, we might not know the cat's gender or think about cats as having a gender. Because the word "cat" doesn't have an implicit gender like it does in most Romance languages, we use the generic pronoun "it". See this example: > Suzanne went to the store. Suzanne is presumed to be female, so we use a feminine pronoun: > *She* went to the store. And here: > Look at my cat! His name is Toby. We know from the use of the word "his" (and the male name "Toby") that the cat is male, so we might respond by saying something like: > *He* is very cute! But the word "cat" doesn't carry a gender unless I give you more information about the cat to help you figure it out. So If I were to post a picture with a caption like: > This is my cat! You can't tell from what I wrote if my cat is a male or a female, and the word "cat" in English does not carry an implicit gender. This means you need an ungendered pronoun to refer to the cat, like: > It is very cute!