The Gender War

Gender-inclusive forms of language will be banned from official government documents in Lower Austria, a policy pushed by the far-right Freedom Party

Photo by Katie Rainbow 🏳️‍🌈 on Unsplash

Servus!

Victory for the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). In the state of Lower Austria, where they are the junior partner in coalition with the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP), the FPÖ has succeeded in driving that great scourge of the Austrian people out of state politics: gender-inclusive language. Very soon, gender-inclusive constructions will be banned from official government documents in Lower Austria, and the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition are recommending that schools and other state institutions follow suit. “Together, on the side of the Austrian people, we are successfully taking a stand against the gender LGBTQ cult,” the party has said.

For the benefit of non-German speakers, I will now do my best to explain what gender-inclusiveness in German means. All German nouns are gendered¹, and nouns referring to gender such as job titles have both a masculine and feminine form. While in English one would only talk about a teacher irrespective of gender², in German one can be a Lehrer, a male teacher, or a Lehrerin, a female teacher. This carries on into the plural form: there are die Lehrer, the male teachers, or die Lehrerinnen, the female teachers. When dealing with a mixed group of people, in the same way that people used to say ‘sirs’ in English, the male plural form used to be the standard one.

In the 1970s, there was a feminist challenge to this male-centric, exclusionary grammatical practice, and today, it is standard practice, especially in political speeches or other formal forms of address, to deploy both plural forms when referring to a group of people: Lehrerinnen und Lehrer. Liebe Österreicherinnen und Österreicher is a standard way for Austrian politicians to speak to the nation. As for written German, starting in the 1990s, the so-called Binnen-I started to pop up, which contracts die Lehrerinnen und Lehrer, say, into a single word, die LehrerInnen with a capital I.

The problem with this, as began to be recognized in the 2010s, is that these forms of pluralization subscribe to the gender binary to the detriment of those who exist outside of it. This led to the development of the ‘gender gap’: a space between the plural forms that creates a place for non-binary and genderqueer people. Examples include the asterisk, the underscore, and the colon, written variably as, to continue with our teacher example, die Lehrer*innen, die Lehrer_innen, and die Lehrer:innen³. In spoken form, the gap is indicated by a glottal stop after, in this case, the second ‘r’ in the word Lehrer.

One sees the gender gap most often in newspapers and magazines with a left-wing tilt such as the German Tageszeitung. More and more, I also see it in official documents published by the City of Vienna or materials like manifestos and press releases published by left-wing and liberal political parties. Use of the gender gap, then, is usually tied up with a person or institution’s politics. This is especially true in spoken form. The gender gap and its necessary glottal stop are the twenty-first century version of the secular Guten Tag instead of the religious Grüß Gott as a form of greeting. But let’s not get into that.

The gender gap is indeed imperfect, and its various forms show how its future in the German language is far from set and subject to rigorous debate. The FPÖ’s focus on gender-inclusive language—not only the gender gap but also the Binnen-I—may seem petty and as remote as the Wars of the Roses. The temptation is to argue that this basically doesn’t matter—at least when compared to the party’s views on immigration or Europe. But it fits in with a broader pattern of thinking on Austria’s far-right alongside its opposition to trans rights and antagonism towards Pride Month and Drag Queen Story Hour: the notion that the gender binary should be enforced through law, a notion taken from the American right. The gender wars have arrived in Austria.

Bis bald!

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1. Your computer and the desk on which it stands are male, but its keyboard and mouse are female. If you keep paper on your desk, well, that’s neuter.

2. The practice of referring to, say, a female writer a ‘lady writer’ has, mercifully, gone the way of the dodo, as have terms like ‘actress,’ ‘waitress,’ and ‘stewardess.’

3. When referring to one teacher, one can write der*die Lehrer*in, for example.