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| Citizens vote on January 26 |
I’m of the school of thought that we should take every
opportunity to fight gender discrimination.
That means, among other things, that I go with the crowd who uses “he or
she,” or (now much more frequently) “they” where once we allowed the masculine
third-person pronoun to stand for both men and women. I follow the convention now well-established
in English-speaking countries and say, “Everybody is entitled to their opinion” (or his or her
opinion) even though I learned as a kid that “everybody” was singular and that their is therefore grammatically incorrect.
Remember the riddle,
A man is driving his son to school. They get into an accident and the man
dies. The son is rushed to the hospital,
but when he arrives for emergency surgery the doctor says "I can’t operate
on this boy. He is my son.”
How is this possible?
The
answer is that the doctor is the boy’s mother.
The reason the riddle works is that when most people hear the word doctor they think of a man. It takes extra brain power to recognize
doctors can be women. For that reason,
children’s book publishers now make efforts to include pictures of women when
they portray doctors. Switching from the
“universal he” to “he or she” or
“they” is part of the same process of moving away from gender bias.
Outside
the English-speaking world, in other countries with a highly developed feminist
consciousness, the same kinds of linguistic and other changes may be
noticed. Sometimes this leads us into a minefield of
complications and unforeseen consequences.
In German, the complications begin with the fact that not just pronouns
are gendered, but nouns as well. English
has one word, student, for both males
and females. German has Student for a male, and Studentin for a female student. The plural of Student is Studenten. The plural of Studentin is Studentinnen. The convention, when addressing “dear
students” in German is to use both forms, and the feminine form first – “Liebe
Studentinnen und Studenten.” Clumsy, but
most people feel worth the effort for the sake of gender equality.
Similarly,
“Dear Voters” would be “Liebe Wählerinnen und Wähler” (masculine singular nouns
ending in –er have the same form in both singular and plural). And so on: investors: Anlegerinnen und
Anleger; foreigners: Ausländerinnen und Ausländer; forklift drivers: Gabelstaplerfahrerinnen und Gabelstaplerfahrer.
In other words, the problem we once had of subsuming the feminine under
the masculine has largely gone away. We
no longer say “gays” for both men and women.
We say “lesbians and gays.” We no
longer say “chairman” for a woman, but “chairwoman” – or “chairperson” or
“chair”. We’re on our way here! But the problems are not over.
For
one thing, we have become more aware of other folk that have long been
“subsumed.” Transsexuals, for example. And, more to the point for linguistic
purposes, people who resent being labeled with either gender and see themselves
as “intergender.” “Gays” became
“Lesbians and Gays,” became “Lesbian, Gay and Bi,” became LGBT, became
LGBTI. And because these issues are
often contested, some prefer queer as
a portmanteau word covering a wide range of “non-standard designations for
sexual identity.” So LGBT became LGBTQ (or even
LGBTQI). Some go with I, some insist on
using both to cover all the bases. Australia,
for example, has an organization called the LGBTI Health Alliance. In the U.S., there is a publication
called LGBTQ Nation. And it should surprise no one that
there are people who would expand that even more to LGBTQIA, where “A” can
stand for either “Asexual” or “Ally”.
Sometimes “Allies” may include “cisgender friends,” “cisgender” being
the word for people for whom gender and biology match.
As
with all social change, progressives try to keep up with the evolution in consciousness and respect
the desire to be recognized in a world accustomed to a limited number of
boxes. Conservatives recognize the boxes
male and female but, depending on the degree of conservatism, begin to balk
as one moves down the line all the way to LGBTQIA. (“What the hell are “allies” doing in there!?”)
And
just as lots of people once felt free to laugh at gays and lesbians – and of
course retrograde folk still do – now there are people who don’t, but still
laugh at transgender people. The farther
down the line, the more the ridicule and the slower the resistance to recognition
and change.
I
had a falling out some time back with a person born female who wanted
henceforth to be addressed as “he.” I
accepted that, believing one should be entitled to determine one’s own gender
and not be boxed in by traditionalists.
But he went further, and resented my personal questions. I was curious about this change, and in my
search for understanding asked some impolitic questions about sex and
gender. My bad. I was willing to apologize for that. I also suggested that insisting the world
give up the use of third-person pronouns entirely was going to go nowhere, that
it might evolve in time, but certainly not overnight. This person was young, impatient, and quick
to see hostility. That marked me in his eyes as an Uncle Tom in the LGBT world. I couldn’t apologize about that in good
faith, so I’m sad to say we simply had to go our separate ways.
Ridicule
is very familiar to lesbians and gay men, and even more to transsexuals. The current willingness of LGBT people to
fight back against it is long overdue, in my view.
The
memory of that Uncle Tom label I got slapped with (“Gay men are the worst
offenders!”) came rushing back this morning when I came across an article in
the Berlin paper, Der Tagesspiegel. The headline ran:
Von „Päpst*innen“ und
„schwangeren Bürger*innen“
Ignore
the asterisks for a minute.
An
English translation might run something like this:
On
“Popes” and “Pregnant Citizens”
But
you see immediately the problem with this translation. The grapheme (as opposed to what once was
simply called a “word”) means the reader has to choose which parts apply.
So
what the sentence
Von „Päpst*innen“ und
„schwangeren Bürger*innen“
actually
means (still ignoring the asterisks for the moment) – and you can see the absurdity – is:
On male or female popes, as the case may be, and pregnant
male or female citizens, as the case may be.
- “Pope” in German is “Pabst” – plural “Päbste.”
- Now “Pope Joan” may be a fictitious character, but real or fictional, she would have to be referred to in German as “Die Päbstin” – the (female) pope. And if there were more than one female pope, they would of course be Päbstinnen.
- Bürger is the German word for (male) “citizen” – plural forms are Bürger (male citizens) and “Bürgerinnen.”
Remember
that Germans are accustomed to having agent nouns that distinguish between
males and females. (Agent nouns usually
mark a person by what he or she does or some cause he or she identifies with –
actor, editor, pianist, dealer, raconteur, Marxist). And while I said that it’s customary to put
the female form first when addressing people publicly, in dictionaries, they
are usually listed in the masculine, with the feminine form as an optional
suffix:
Bürger-innen
Wähler-innen
And in print, evidently to save space, instead of typing Bürgerinnen und Bürger, or using the
hyphen, it’s
common to push the two words into one, and capitalize the i.
BürgerInnen
And
now there’s yet another way to go, at least in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, one of
the districts of Berlin. Instead of a
hyphen or a capitalized mushed-together feminine ending, they’re using an
asterisk. What has happened here is that advocates of language
change want language to reflect newfound recognition that intersex people are
left out by this binary, by having
to choose between the –er and the –innen word endings. So they have inserted an asterisk. This new concoction,
Bürger*innen
is
understood to include 1) Bürger, 2) Bürgerinnen, and 3) * (neither).
Not
so much a “word” as a “grapheme” with parts to be chosen as they may apply.
Because of my bad experience in trying to caution
advocates not to expect too much too soon, I’m more willing now to err (if
that’s what I’m doing) in the opposite direction. I’m climbing on the bandwagon here, hoping to
make amends.
But that only brings me back to the next question –
whether or not this headline was meant as ridicule. I say no, that it was simply pointing out a
logical absurdity created by the complexity involved. What Der Tagesspiegel
has done is to poke fun at the absurdities which can come out of what conservatives
would call “politically correct language.”
(And note, here, that you don’t have to go very far to the right to be
called ‘conservative’ in this instance.)
But that risks my getting slapped with the Uncle Tom
designator once again. I might, of
course simply say this struggle is not a joke and we should all get behind the folks who
identify as intersex, period.
My problem is I think “popes or popesses, as the case may be” is funny.
And so I laugh.
Much as you want change now, some things are going to
take time. My guess is this attempt to
legislate change in the German language will work itself out. We'll laugh for a time, and then we'll begin to take it in stride.
Think
back to the early days of the move in English toward eliminating the “subsumed
feminine.” Remember the example of such
constructs as
This coupon is good for a 20%
reduction on all brassieres. A customer
may select the brand of his his
or her her choice while the supply lasts.
was a three-step learning process. Step 1, the traditional grammatical, gave way to Step 2, the politically sensitive/correct, which then gave way to Step 3, reality. Ditto for things like using “chairman” when
we know the person is male, and “chairwoman” when we know the person is female. The solutions don’t get legislated. They evolve eventually.
The
asterisk in Bürger*innen
may or may
not catch on. There is no need to throw
the baby out with the bathwater. No need
to say Päbstinnen und Päbste. And one day we will not feel the need to indicate the possibility of an intersex pope. We can just say Päbste, and accept that hell will freeze over before this patriarchal institution will have a legitimate female pope, much less an intersex one. If I'm wrong, we can make changes then.
And
there is no need to say schwangere
Bürgerinnen und Bürger. We can leave
off the masculine form Bürger when referring to pregnancy.
In the meantime some of us old fogeys (male and female) will have a chuckle now and then,
like the Tagesspiegel did, while
things sort themselves out.
And those impatient for change will call us Uncle Toms. (Or should that be Uncle Tom persons?)
It will all be fine one day.
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