Gendering

Friends of Humanism, Berlin-Schöneberg

I have a clear memory of the first time I was forced to consider whether social change could be effected by linguistic change. I was in a sociolinguistics class in graduate school, quite recently in the greater scheme of things, in my case. That question immediately begged a previous question: can linguistic change be effected by decree? The standard answer to the decree question is no, that language can only evolve over time, that language changes from the bottom up, not top down.

When I used to bring my report card home, my mother would sign it, "Mrs. John S. McCornick." That was in the dark ages. Few women I know would do such a thing today, because we have come to believe women should not take their identities from their fathers or their husbands or anybody else, that women should be treated as equals with men and language should reflect that equality. Many women don't take their husband's family name when they marry, and we have pretty much retired the word "Miss" and replaced it with "Ms." because we no longer think, collectively, that women should be marked by their marriage status. And the fact that Ms. has become the standard form of address for a woman instead of Miss, shows that "the standard answer" I spoke about in the first paragraph isn't totally accurate. There are times when we can "legislate" language.

This is not just an American or an English-language phenomenon.  Germany uses "Frau" the way we have traditionally used "Mrs." and when I was a kid they used "Fräulein" the way we used "Miss." But they have assumed the same feminist consciousness we have, and have all but eliminated the word Fräulein, at least for adult women, and use only Frau these days.  For the past couple weeks, at regular intervals, in large part as a means of escaping the depressing news of the spread of covid and the evidence of a likely collapse of American democracy, I've been listening to a debate raging in Germany over what they call "gendering." They've taken the English word "gender" and made a verb out of it - gendern - "to gender," and they use it to heighten the awareness of the now discredited patriarchal practice of assuming women can be subsumed under masculine-identified words and eliminating the problem by means of language-fixing.

We have a similar thing going on in English, where we used to use he to represent both he and she, as in "Everybody intending to use the pool should bring his (sic) own towel." Today, we are careful to say something like "his or her" own towel. And, actually, we've kind of settled now on using their as not only a plural pronoun but a singular pronoun as well, because his or her is just so clumsy-sounding. "Everybody should bring their own towel."

Speakers of all Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages are all faced with the same challenges to a newly heightened feminist consciousness, since those languages are all gendered. In Spanish, todo is all in the masculine and toda is all in the feminine: all the boys is todos los muchachos and all the girls is todas las muchachas. No problem there. But if you want to say this applies to everybody, you say esto se aplica a todos, unless you know that "everybody" is meant to refer to a bunch of women only. Then you say esto se aplica a todas. The default is always masculine; you use the feminine form only when you're referring specifically to women only. Todos means all the men or all the men and women; todas means only all the women. The same applies to other Romance languages as well: tout means all (male), toute means all (female), toutes is the word for all in the plural (female only) and tous is the word for all in the plural also, but means all males or all of both genders). Same in Italian: tutto-tutti and tutta-tutte - tutti meaning all (masculine or masculine and feminine) and tutte meaning all (feminine only).

Advocates of gender equality in Spanish-speaking countries have been trying to find a solution to the "masculine-default" for some time now. You regularly see Latinx now for what in English we call Latinos, people of hispanic origin. Others are suggesting the -o masculine ending and the -a feminine ending be gotten rid of and replaced in both cases by -e. Latinos and Latinas would become Latines.

Nice try, but so far no cigar.

The Germans are having a particularly difficult time of it. On the one hand, to the greatest extent possible, most educated speakers of German, especially when they are speaking in public, make the effort to do what is called Beidnennung ("both-naming"). That is, they don't say Alle Ärzte, for all doctors, using the traditional masculine plural form and subsuming female doctors under the word.  They "double up" and expressly lay out both the masculine and the feminine forms. These days they go to the trouble of saying Alle Ärztinnen und Ärzte. This is what they mean by gendering.

You can probably see the problem coming down the pike. You quickly run into difficulties when the attempt to be all-inclusive makes you look foolish. It makes sense to say the plural of worker in modern-day German is Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter and not simply Arbeiter, and if you go to the online German/English dictionary dict.cc and type in "Welcome, dear readers" on the English side, Google will reveal its raised feminist consciousness by translating this for you as Willkommen, liebe Leserinnen und Leser. Try it, if you don't believe me.

But what happens when you take out "readers" and put in "murderers"? Google will, very helpfully, supply a translation. But not Willkommen, liebe Mörderinnen und Mörder, but simply Willkommen, liebe Mörder.  They know not to gender bad people.

And, just in passing, it's kind of fun to note that if you type in simply Mörderin, you'll get the English translation murderess. Don't you love it? They give you the word with the now archaic suffix for feminine equivalents to masculine words for professions (and occupations like murderers). Was Amelia Earhart a pilot or a pilotess, an aviator or an aviatrix? We still use host and hostess, but we've given up air hostess, and replaced both steward and stewardess with flight attendant. So if you look at this historically, we first consciousness-raised ourselves from acknowledging that flying a plane was not just a man's job, but a woman's as well, by creating the word pilotess to pair with pilot. And then raised ourselves again by eliminating the word pilotess and reverting back to pilot as a word which is meant to specify both men and women. And there is a ton of meaning in the fact that we don't have the pair butcher-butcheress but we do have the pair actor-actress, still in active use (although many insist these days on referring to actresses as actors).

Apparently, this practice of Beidnennung ("both naming")," i.e., always making the effort to use the feminine plural forms along with the masculine forms and not letting the masculine plural be the default for both men and women, has begun to sit heavy on modern-day teutonophones. People are looking for alternatives. And they've not had much luck.

One of the ways they've tried to shorten things is to use a slash. Instead of Lehrerinnen und Lehrer for teachers, some people are writing Lehrer/-innen. Others leave out the dash: Lehrer/innen. Still others leave out the slash as well and capitalize the letter i: LehrerInnen. And there are still more possibilities. One can use what's called "the gender star": Lehrer*innen. Or "the gender colon": Lehrer:innen. Or what they are playfully calling "the gender gap": Lehrer_innen.

And that leads us into the murky land of some wildly clumsy circumlocutions, where you have to wonder if you've gone too far. A congressperson or representative in Germany, a member of the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, is called ein Abgeordneter (if he's a man) or eine Abgeordnete (if she's a woman), and this leads to translating the English representative by „ein_e Abgeordnete_r“. Welcome to the world of "oh, why bother!" and "this is getting ridiculous!" For one thing, how do you pronounce such a product of political correctness? What sort of works in writing really falls apart when speaking.

Some are suggesting that the way to go about things is to use the glottal stop in speaking where you see a gender star or colon or gap or capital i.  That's the sound that you make before pronouncing the two o's in "oh-oh!" Very common in German, so not as crazy as it sounds.

But still crazy. And just when you think you've had all the tsuris you can take on this subject, along come the queer theorists who complain that the problem with the "Inside i" - the i in LehrerInnen - may reflect a feminist consciousness, but it also furthers the heterosexist failure to recognize a binary-bias. People are not just male or female; they are also bisexual, pansexual, and asexual, not to mention none-of-your-damned-business-sexual. 

So much for solving problems by catching your breath.

I absolutely don't want to trivialize or minimize the efforts in the more enlightened spots on the planet to seek to diminish racism, sexism and homophobia. Those issues are near and dear to my heart.

But I have to admit I'm taking to my couch here. I don't have to address crowds in the German language or write for the German-language media, so I can just observe these goings-on from afar and wish everybody well.

Hope you find your way through the maze before the Rapture takes us up into heaven to live with the angels and we learn at long last whether the fact that Gabriel and Michael are the only two angels mentioned in the Bible means that all angels are male. If not, do we then need to speak of them as Engelinnen und Engel in German, as opposed to just Engel?  And EngelInnen?  or Engel*innen? when we write about them in our diaries?

photo credit: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-Gap_(Unterstrich)