For example, when you say “the door” in French, it’s feminine; “La porte” instead of “Le porte”. What happens if I use “Le” instead of “La”? Does it change the meaning?
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As everything that has to do with human languages, gendered nouns are a mess 🙂 and function somewhat differently in different languages.
A few people here already gave you examples from French where changing the gender changes the meaning. This isn’t a language feature that would be related to gendered words, the existence of these examples is a similar coincidence to the existence of homonyms – words that are spelled the same but have different meaning. For example, “bank” in English can (among other things) be “a river bank” or “account in a bank”. These two “bank”s have a completely different etymology and they just happen to end up spelled and pronounced the same in current English. Many examples of masculine and feminine forms of the same word having different meanings are such accidents.
Of course, there are also cases where the change of gender is also meaningful. For example, the Spanish “el gato” and “la gata” are words for a male and a female cat. Here it’s actually two forms of the same word, with one extra difference: the first one uses the masculine suffix -o, the second one the feminine suffix -a.
There isn’t one universal way how words get their genders. In many languages the genders for inanimate objects mostly follow syntactic rules. For example, in German one way to form diminuitives is by attaching the -chen suffix, and grammatically everything with this suffix is in neuter (a neutral gender that’s neither masculine nor feminine). Der Tisch (a table, masculine) becomes das Tischchen (a tiny table, neuter). The current German word for a girl, das Mädchen, is also in neuter due to this grammatical reason, even though girls are obviously feminine. (The word itself is a diminuitive of an old word for a girl-servant, cognate with the modern English “maid”.)
Many languages (e.g., Latin and also almost all modern Slavic languages) express grammatical cases via suffixes. If you saw the movie Life of Brian, there is one famous scene where the Roman centurion corrects Brian’s spelling, and one of the corrections is that his original “domus” (the home) should be “domum” (in the direction towards the home). In Slovak, the English phrases “a rabbit”, “meat of a rabbit”, and “stew with a rabbit” are spelled “zaja**c**”, “mäso zo zaja**ca**”, and “guláš so zaja**com**”. In these languages, there are multiple sets of suffixes that can be used to express the different grammatical cases, and the grammatical gender of inanimate objects is mostly determined by the best-fitting set of suffixes. To put it very simply, words that rhyme tend to have the same gender. So, for example, words for inanimate objects that resemble words for actually masculine objects now have the masculine grammatical gender and use the same or very similar suffixes for declension.
Word etymology, phonology, analogies with animate objects and many other factors can also play a role. As I said in the beginning, it’s a mess with no single correct answer 🙂
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