Is God Male or Female?

Somehow this has been a controversial question all my life.
i'm not sure why.
It's obvious God is male, right?
Or is it?
Actually, English has a problem with translation, especially of Scripture.  (Then again, translation itself is full of problems.)

John 4:24, in OJB and The Voice translations  You may also want to check  Good News and JB Phillips translations

 Spirit, that means gender is irrelevant.  God is genderless, but we can't exactly refer to God as "It," because in English, the implication is less than human. 
And God is so much more than human.
Most Scriptural references to God are male, but in other passages, feminine words are used to better illustrate God's care of us.
Me, i'm a traditionalist, but not a legalist.  We're used to God as "He."  i'll continue to use it.
But neither this word nor "She" come anywhere near telling us anything about Him.
Words are only the beginning.  It's what we have to work with.

Here are four articles at which i looked in preparing this.  Before choosing them, i simply asked the question as above in a Google search, and read each of the first page suggestions. Your search may come up with different ones. 
A concise explanation: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102008370
The article from which i took my wordart: https://www.josh.org/god-male-female/ 
https://www.gotquestions.org/God-male-female.html
view from a Torah scholar: http://forward.com/scribe/370728/when-biblical-gender-is-lost-in-translation/
view from a conservative Christian minister: http://www.moodychurch.org/crossroads/blog/gods-feminine-attributes/