PC: Romance language that drops gender

Romance languages have feminine nouns derived from Latin feminine and masculine derived from Latin masculine and neuter. Sound changes tend to render this two-way distinction one way or another, (almost) always merging masculine and neuter.

Could a Romance language plausibly go through sound changes that merge the Proto-Romance feminine and masculine? I had two ideas for how this could be done, and am looking for feedback on plausibility.

1. In Occitan, masculine -o is dropped, while some dialects have feminine -a /a/ becoming -o /ɔ/. If a Romance language had the same change to the feminine ending, but preserved the masculine ending, presumably they could both collapse to /o/ or /ɔ/ (possibly then shifting to another sound like /ə/ or back to /a/). The spelling would reflect the sound (presumably -o if /o/, -a if /a/, -o or -a if /ɔ/, and -a or -e if /ə/, depending on how the sound ends up).

2. Alternatively, could feminine -a and masculine -o simply collapse into /ə/? If they did, I assume this sound would be spelled -e, as it tends to be spelled that way when it appears in Romance languages (such as in the Old French feminine).

As for the definite article, something like Spanish el or Italian il wound serve to keep masculine distinct from feminine, so instead this hypothetical Romance language would have had lo when it had genders, fusing lo and la into whatever form the de-gendered nouns take. Not sure how to deal with the indefinite article though as the masculine seems to be universally some variant of un. Maybe feminine una simply drops its vowel?

Are either of these reduction systems possible?
 
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Both of these systems are entirely plausible. I'm actually surprised this isn't what happened with French - the only thing that's preserved the masculine gender in nouns is the loss of final consonants after the loss of the pre-French final -o. The articles have kept a little more of the distinction, but even here, gender distinction has been lost in the plural. So yeah, you could easily have had alt-Gallo-Romance languages like alt-French or alt-Occitan that completely lost grammatical gender. However, the mechanisms for why certain structural changes in languages take place or not is still poorly understood.

There's nothing in principle to prevent the loss of the grammatical gender system in one or more Romance languages - it's happened to several major Indo-European languages, most notably English (which retains it only in the 3rd-person singular pronouns) and Persian (which has completely lost grammatical gender as a structural category). Most other IE languages, with the exception of Slavic, Greek, and some Germanic languages, have also reduced the original 3-gender system to 2, either merging masculine and neuter (Romance, Indic?), or masculine and feminine (Dutch, Scandinavian).
 
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