Introduction to Affirming Care for Gender and Sexual Minorities

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Gender-Neutral Language

In recent years, LGBTQ activists and linguists around the world have championed more inclusive language, both by creating entirely new non-binary terms and by retooling already existing words and grammar constructions.

English grammar doesn’t distinguish between genders except in assigning a masculine or feminine singular pronoun.In 2019 the Merriam-Webster dictionary added “they” as the pronoun to use for a “single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.”

Spanish has feminine and masculine cases added to all nouns. In classrooms and daily conversations, young people are changing the way they speak and write — replacing the masculine “o” or the feminine “a” with the gender-neutral “e” in certain words — to change what they see as a deeply gendered culture,”

Arabic is another grammatically gendered language, with each verb, noun and adjective always assigned either a male or female case. The male is the default in plurals, even if it’s just one male in an otherwise female group.Public awareness and tolerance of this inclusive language remains extremely low in Arabic-speaking countries.

Hebrew, like Arabic, assigns a gender to verbs, nouns, and adjectives based on the noun. inverting the gender divides, such as defaulting to a feminine plural or using a “mixed” gender, sometimes male and sometimes female for the same person.

German’s notoriously complicated syntax includes male, female and neutral grammatical genders. “Traditionally, gender differentiation in German is signified by the suffixes “r” or “rn” for men (singular and plural), and “in” or “innen” for women (singular and plural) … Current attempts to shorten the space devoted to accepted forms of differentiation have included the introduction of an uppercase “I” sandwiched in compound nouns addressing both males and females at once. An asterisk, known as the “gender star” has also been added to include citizens who do not consider themselves either."

French also assigns a gender of male or female to all nouns referring to an individual; references to a group of people are by default defined by male pronouns unless the group is made up entirely of women. The idea is instead to use asterisks to combine case endings and create a more inclusive gender-neutral plural — like “ami•e•s” for friends — a first step that neither privileges the male as a norm nor excludes the male and a gender spectrum from the syntax.

n 2015, Sweden added to the country’s official dictionary the word “hen” — a gender-neutral pronoun that linguists had pushed as an alternative to the male pronoun “han” and female “hon.”

Learn more about gender-neutral language here.

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