This Asterisk Is Shaping German Politics

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Sources:

Brander, S., Heßenkemper, H., Höchst, N., Mrosek, A., Seitz, T., AfD. (2021). "Keine Verwendung der sogenannten gendergerechten Sprache durch die Bundesregierung". Deutscher Bundestag. 19. Wahlperiode.

Grabrucker, M. (1993). Vater Staat hat keine Muttersprache. Frankfurt/M: Fischer.

Landesgleichstellungsgesetz vom 4. Juli 1994 (GVBl.I/94, [Nr. 19], S.254).

00:00 - Intro
02:20 - Gender Neutrality in German
04:50 - The Politics
13:52 - Credits

Written and created by K Klein
Art by kvd102
Aditional research and script supervision by Inola Scheel

#genderideology #gender #germany

[kklein]

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[bananenmusli]

Your last point is a real example.

The Swiss constitution said that every Swiss person has the right to vote in the generic masculin (Jeder Schweizer). Before women were given the right to vote in Switzerland, many women sued the government for not giving them the right to vote even though they should be included in the generic masculin word of "Schweizer". The court rejected their claim by saying that it is obvious that only men are meant by this term.

That's why today the Swiss constitution says "Jeder Schweizer und jede Schweizerin"

[lyfja]

12:04 AFAIK that's the exact way how women were excluded from being able to vote in Switzerland. The article in the law stated that all "Schweizer" were allowed to vote, but no "Schweizerinnen" which is how they got away with banning women from voting until 1971(!).

[scribblecloud]

its kinda funny how the german word for cat is almost the exact reverse of this, where "katze" is used to refer to cats in general, but the masculine term "kater" is used to refer to male cats specifically

[eddiemcguire]

I was annoyed enough 40 years ago when as a high schooler we were instructed to use "he or she" in writing or formal speech (rather than the "they" we all used naturally), and some responded by using the unsayable "s/he."

[kamikitazawa]

Here in USA, it's easy to think that Europe is somehow immune to the culture wars that are raging over here. Seeing videos like this reminds me that that is very much not the case.

[sebbrennan]

I have a German speaking exam tomorrow and this is one of three possible topics. Now I have an excuse to watch youtube and pretend I'm still revising :)

[lol-xswz]

It should noted that laws generally don't use the Gendersternchen.
They use a different way of gender neutrality: Using the present participle.

So instead of "Spielerinnen und Spieler", they say "Spielende", which is formed from the verb "spielen".

I think it's a much more elegant form. There are other ways. Like instead of "Bürgerinnen und Bürger" (citizen), they instead use words "Staatsvolk" (statespeople).

There are many creative ways of being gender neutral. While I don't like the Gendersternchen, I do like these alternate forms and words.

[cormacpalmer]

To add to your point about generic masculine being used in laws as an excuse to ban women from things; we had that exact thing happen here in the US during the suffrage movement. Several states tried to stop individual women from running for office by pointing out that the state constitutions only mentioned congress"men" and stuff like that. Don't remember which states off the top of my head, but look it up

[Tudsamfa]

I believe I've heard of similar problem with "all men are created equal", being written in generic masculine as well.

Nowadays, we can read it and say "Ah yes, "all men" as in "all of humanity"".

While in the past, depending on who was suing for equal rights, it was interpreted in the courts as "only (white/free/landowning) men".

[glo_bin]

Think of all those gender stars you have to print whenever you use gender-correct language. Ink doesn't grow on trees!

[akaSmth]

I don't gender either and I think that it can interrupt the reading flow quite a bit. But the way some people get upset about it and want to ban it is also ridiculous.

[CocoTreb]

People who can't pronounce "worcestershire" when I pull up 5:31:

[aggressive_pizza]

It might sound controversial but I never got why there's no movement which tries to instead separate grammatical gender from the social understanding of gender. For example, if we wanted to make them sound distinct, we could call "masculine nouns" and "feminine nouns" "nouns of class I"/ "dictionary form nouns" and "nouns of class II" or something along those lines. This way, people would focus on the phonetic aspect of grammar instead of the innate gender of things.

An example of this would be how in Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese, the "feminine" class of nouns ends in a clearly audible vowel whereas the "masculine" ones end in a consonant or specific set of vowels.

Likewise, if we end up separating these two concepts, the next question would be "why would we need a second way of saying teacher, player, singer etc?", to which I'd say that we could just drop the "feminine" version and instead focus on the "dictionary form" as the default (kind of like in English nowadays if we exclude words like "actress")

This way, we could just say "Lehrer" and not have any implicit bias towards men because people simply wouldn't associate it with the male gender to begin with. Thank you for listening to my TED Talk

[dreimaldie]

There's been a court case in Germany about the „Gleichstellungsbeauftragte, “ a legally mandated position. According to literal law, this position may be held by a woman or a man and they are elected to help women and men. Because both genders were explicitly named when the law was written, before nonbinary identities were officially recognized mind you, the judge ruled that nonbinary people were explicitly excluded and cannot hold the office or benefit from it.
This should by extension support your warning, that generic masculine laws could be read as definite masculine

[RougeEric]

Inclusivity in legal texts is actually extremely important in some rare cases: the recent French law granting rights to assisted reproductive technology was amended to specify that the right was given to WOMEN specifically, in order to exclude trans men.
Small apparently innocuous changes to wording can drastically affect the meaning of a law; and though it is unlikely that people from countries with a grammatical "standard" gender would ever consider phrasing to not be inclusive; it could technically happen if there is sufficient motive and intention.

[starsky]

In russian we use brackets for the same:

Он ходил в парк🧍🏻‍♂️ (he was going to a park)

Она ходила в парк🧍🏻‍♀️ (she was going to a park)

Он(а) ходил(а) в парк🧍🏻(she or he was going to a park)

[schwambibambi]

As a German, I feel like you oversimplified it a little bit (or maybe it's just my university), but my papers get handed back to me if I fail to gender correctly. In oral discussions, some teachers will ask you to gender if you use the generic masculine. There is, besides the explicit instances, an implicit pressure to always gender in an academic context and I feel like this is the point of contempt for many: it feels obligatory, otherwise you get branded as a sexist.

[anoukk_]

In dutch we have something similar to lehrer and lehrerin: 'leraar' and 'lerares' but we also have a neutral 'leerkracht' which translates to teachforce

[Martykun]

Spanish has the same issue but an advantage (?) is that gender in Spanish tends to hinge on a single letter.

For instance, a male or gender-neutral friend is "amigo" and a female friend is "amiga". So there's several ways to shorten "amigo o amiga" in a single word such as "amigo/a", "amig@" or "amigx".

Needless to say, a lot of people don't like this.

There is another way of gender-neutral writing which is ending words in -e instead of -o or -a or -@ or whatever, I'd say it really picked up in the 00s. This is based on gender-neutral words that are already in the language such as "le". For instance "a mi amiga le dije hola" means "I said hello to my (female) friend" and "a mi amigo le dije hola" means "I said hello to my (male or gender-neutral) friend". Note that the word "le" does not change, so the letter e takes a gender-neutral role.

Other words such as "estudiante" (student) or adjectives ending in -e such as "competente" or "inteligente" also don't specify gender, in contrast to adjectives ending in -o or -a which do. This allows us to create words such as "amigue" (gender neutral friend) or "chique" (gender-neutral boy (chico) or girl (chica)).

Now this, a lot of people REALLY don't like it. These new words can sound pretty alien, and people can get legitimately confused when they hear them for the first time. This hasn't even been popularized in the entire Spanish sphere, some immigrants think they're just another local word they haven't learned yet.

What people tend to do when they don't want to deal with all that is try to use a gender-neutral synonym whenever possible. Instead of "alumno" or "alumna" (student) we just say "estudiante", instead of "miembro" or "miembra" (member) we just say "integrante", etc.