Every fall, I teach a university seminar entitled “Inclusive Management of Diverse Teams.” Every year, like clockwork, I stun the room into silence on the first day when I explain the course aims and expectations (picture 35 bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Gen Z deers in the headlight who really care about their grade). Notably, this isn’t when they learn about the graded 75-minute group presentation and accompanying individual essay. No, I’ve just told them I expect them to use inclusive language in speaking and writing. (And that they will be graded on their effort.)
“Using inclusive language is a part of building an inclusive culture as a leader,” I explain. After all, language reflects reality, creates and shapes it, and vice versa. Language can impact how we think about and approach problems. When we casually say things like, "That idea is crazy" or "This traffic is insane," we may unintentionally reinforce negative stereotypes about mental health. Over time, this type of language can influence how we perceive and talk about people experiencing mental health challenges, potentially trivializing their experiences or encouraging stigma.
In inclusive language guidelines (universities, government entities, organizations…), inclusive language is often defined apophatically: don’t discriminate, disadvantage, or exclude anyone. In short, don’t cause other people harm with your language. The UN’s first inclusive language guidelines were titled “A Guide to Non-Sexist Language.” “Don’t be an asshole” is the bare minimum for language to be inclusive. Inclusive language requires much more active work and critical reflection than ticking boxes in a mental (or literal) checklist. Instead, you might ask yourself: How can I convey respect to everyone? Am I effectively communicating my message through precise language? Am I acknowledging diversity? Am I learning from past mistakes and updating my language based on knowledge gained? (This is why my students are expected to do their own research on inclusive language; I don’t provide them with easy-to-follow rules.)
A small detail to help you explain why my students are aghast at the expectation of using inclusive language: I teach in German. Let’s back up and introduce some necessary background for my non-German readers: You might think it’s hard to rewire your brain from saying “hi, guys” to “hi, folks,” but inclusive language in German is an entirely different beast. For one, German’s grammatical gender is pervasive: Nouns are assigned one of three grammatical genders and preceded by a corresponding article (der / die / das). With many words, the ending can change depending on the gender of the person concerned. For instance, a teacher (male) would be “der Lehrer,” and a teacher (female) would be “die Lehrerin.”
Conventionally, the masculine plural describes a mixed gender group (“die Lehrer” are multiple teachers of different genders). “Women are subordinated in language. The point is to make them visible,” said Luise F. Pusch, a feminist linguist working on the issue of gender neutrality in German. In this way, gender-inclusive language is a way to change patriarchal norms. Studies consistently find that grammatical gender carries connotative meanings of femininity and masculinity. This same linked study finds that words with masculine grammatical gender are generally considered to carry higher potency in both Spanish and German, for instance. In contrast, the grammatically feminine gender connotes softness. The generic masculine carries meaning for readers, too: If you were to write a job advertisement looking for an “Elektroingenieur” (in its grammatically masculine form), research shows pretty convincingly that most people first think of male electrical engineers. TLDR: Language shapes how we see the world.
You might argue that this is a detail — who does it hurt? Well — it hurt me. I still remember an exchange I had in French class 24 years ago, almost word for word. My French teacher explained to the class that we use the masculine third-person plural pronoun (“ils”) to describe a mixed-gender group. “What if it’s just one man and a hundred women?,” I bargained, bristling at the unfairness that a small handful of men could completely crowd out the presence of women. “What if we don’t know whether there are any men?” I pleaded. “Non,” she said. “Mais pourquoi?” I asked. “It’s just grammar,” my teacher said with finality.
In 2020, Germany’s most influential dictionary, the Duden (think Oxford English Dictionary), began changing all of the entries for nouns referring to people (that’s 12,000 in total) to add feminine versions and explicitly defining the masculine version as referring to men only. This did not sit well with the German Language Society, which went into full offense mode and collected 27’000 signatures in a petition against Duden (can you imagine caring this much about a dictionary using language that doesn’t exclude over half of the population?). Its chairman, Walter Krämer, described attempts at changing language in this way to make women visible as “a modern Hitler salute” used by “left-wing ideologues” to signal that they belong to a particular group (in a German context, this is bonkers language, which is probably not inclusive of me to say, but whatever).
Writing “Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen” (dear female and male colleagues) in a team-wide email to remind your coworkers to please put their used coffee cups into the dishwasher every night might make the women visible, but not nonbinary people. The best-known solution, dubbed the Gendersternchen (“gender star”), places an asterisk before the feminine word ending: Bürger*innen for “citizens.” The Sternchen creates literal room for all genders to be included in the word’s meaning.1 When speaking a word with a star out loud, you insert a small pause where the star is. I find the idea of the gender star beautiful in its simplicity. Isn’t it marvelous how language can adapt to literally make space for new ideas?
Last month, in my own backyard of Zurich, Switzerland, a group of “interested citizens” tried to outlaw the use of the “gender star” in official city documents. This popular initiative responded to the City of Zurich’s decision to introduce the gender star in its communication. The initiative committee has a flair for the dramatic: It wishes to “free the City of Zurich from the gender star,” demonstrating how Swiss politics focuses on the truly important political struggles of our times.
Their main arguments? Using a gender star makes the German language “cumbersome” and “incomprehensible” and impedes readability. We certainly wouldn’t want the German language (famous for its theoretically endless compound nouns) to be cumbersome and difficult to read! The Guinness Book of World Records notes that the longest German word that was ever in use (i.e., people had to read and say it) was "Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft." Granted, this is not a word I have ever used, and before today, not one that I’ve ever tried to say out loud. In my everyday working life, the longest word I routinely use is probably “Finanzdienstleistungsunternehmen” (financial services company).
My point is that it’s a bit rich for sticklers of German grammar to quibble with an asterisk's unwieldiness and aesthetics. Note that no one forces you to use a gender star: This is just about reading official documents. How lazy is it not to be willing to read a single new character in a word? If even just reading a linguistic representation of women and nonbinary folks is this upsetting, then you need to give some deep, honest thought as to why. Here’s a hint: The initiative’s campaign shows an eraser erasing the symbol that holds space for women, non-binary people, and all others who do not feel included in the generic masculine. Their campaign visual is a representation of the erasure of over half of the population. (Spoiler alert: The initiative failed.)
The Zurich example is one of hundreds (thousands?) of instances where inclusive language has been politicized, demonstrating how (inclusive) language remains a political lightning rod for people all across the political spectrum. Donald Trump’s campaign ran the ad copy, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” The ad worked. In 2022, the city of Buenos Aires blocked the use of gender-inclusive language in schools. Opponents of inclusive language, like a certain Tom Slater from Spiked, like to argue that it “speaks to how myopically, psychotically focused our political culture now is on language policing and performative virtue that it is even an issue at all.” Wild guess: Slater has probably never experienced erasure by language. If language shapes reality, isn’t it everything?
And yet: I’m a professional gender diversity researcher, and I’m constantly worried that I’m getting inclusive language wrong, too. Do I write “womxn”? How do I pronounce that? Can I use the word “manpower”? Do I use “they/them” if I’m unsure about the gender identity of the person I’m addressing/writing about? Is the “T” in trans capitalized? In fact, I’ve procrastinated on hitting “send” on this essay for almost two weeks because I’m scared that I’ve written something offensive without meaning to.
Why is inclusive language so scary? There is a growing sense that inclusive language expectations “is actually a social marker, distinguishing the woke from the unwoke.” Speaking of inclusive language: Words matter. “Woke” was historically a Black activist watchword; staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. “Woke” may have become a single-word description of leftist political ideology in the 2020s, but the phrase “stay woke” has much deeper roots. It first appeared in the spoken afterword of the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter. The appropriation of the term by the (still largely White) Left is problematic in and of itself, but the Right is now using it almost as a slur. Last year, Ron DeSantis said: “We will fight the woke in the legislature. We will fight the woke in education. We will fight the woke in the businesses. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.” Sir: Your racism is showing. Language matters.
This brief history of wokeness also shows how inclusive language has become a new way of creating in-groups and out-groups, just as language has always done. In “Imagined Communities”, Benedict Anderson argues that the spread of common, vernacular languages enabled people to recognize their shared interests, see themselves as part of a community of individuals that they might never meet face-to-face, and eventually form nations. But languages, by their modern nature of pronunciation and grammar rules and books and newspapers (and newsletters!), aren’t meant to exclude.2 To quote Anderson: “English, like any other language, is always open to new speakers, listeners, and readers.”
The politicization of inclusive language has somehow made it into a zero-sum game. It is at this point that I’d like to remind you (in the words of philosopher Julian Baggini) that “inclusive language can exclude if used badly, but exclusive language excludes by necessity.” Consider: As with the argument that (somehow) allowing a same-sex couple to get married takes away something from my marriage to my husband, there is now a palpable sense that gender-inclusive language would take away our individual ability to express our own gender identity. In 2019, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni shouted in a political speech: “I’m Giorgia. I’m a woman. I’m a mother. I’m an Italian. I’m a Christian.” You do you, Giorgia. Making it possible for everyone to be their authentic self is sort of the point.
Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) like J.K. Rowling strongly feel that including trans women somehow diminishes the feminist movement, as if human rights were a pie, where I can have less if I give some to you. But this isn’t even the most extreme take. The linguist John McWhorter summed up in the NYT Opinion section: “The most heated arguments about gender-neutral pronouns, however, render a different objection: They claim that allowing people to choose their own pronouns is a gateway to things like gender-affirming surgery, gender-neutral bathrooms and trans women on women’s sports teams.”
Language might be able to create reality, but it is not some kind of magic spell. I wish! Linguistic feminists in Germany first introduced a visual representation of women in generically masculine words in the mid-1960s, 60 years ago. They proposed a “/” where now there is a “*” or “:” or “_”, “Bürger/innen” instead of “Bürger,” citizens. If language was a kind of witchcraft that can change facts at will, then maybe Switzerland would have had women’s voting rights before 1972, and we’d have pay equity, and equitable parental leave.3
Let me introduce you to a term from yet another language, that is, Reddit lingo: ESH, everybody sucks here.4 At least, if you don’t make it possible for people to make mistakes when using inclusive language. What if I use the wrong pronoun? What if the gender star falls out of favor (which it sort of did)? Fear of getting “canceled” makes people engage less with those who might not yet speak their (inclusive) language.5 Language happens through discourse, and part of that discourse means making mistakes. It is through interaction that we learn about the identity and preferences of the other.
“It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them.” - Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries
I don’t want to get it wrong. I don’t want to get canceled (though, perhaps luckily, I don’t have the reach where this might be a problem). The inclusive language debate has come at a time when there is growing discomfort with being wrong, with negative feedback. The psychologist
wrote a powerful essay about our collective decrease in distress tolerance (entering the treacherous arenas of nuanced conversation). “Part of this discomfort with being real fuels the fires of “cancel culture,” in which, rather than engage in vulnerable, good-faith conversation with people who disagree with us, we simply cut them off, avoiding the discomfort by avoiding the people.” You need to allow for good-faith growth and learning regarding languages.6People aren’t mind readers. I can Google all I want, but I might not get the “correct” answer because the correct answer doesn’t exist. Language is always subjective. A phrasing or spelling that is important to one person might feel alien to another person, even if they are, on the surface, from the same group. You can’t say “Shibboleth” - bam! - you’re an ally.
Let me take you back to my classroom, where my students have just received the missive about using inclusive language, and they’ve been told that I won’t provide them with an easy-to-use, how-to guide to inclusive language. Stunned silence. I add: “You don’t have to do it perfectly, but I want to see you try.” This simple phrase is the key to learning to use language inclusively, and I believe it’s an essential bit of nuance that is missing from much of the discourse on “gendering” (or “de-gendering”) language. Get it wrong? Apologize, move on, and do better next time.
To those of you incensed at the idea of seeing a little asterisk in the middle of a word or a pronoun you’re unfamiliar with - the discomfort you’re feeling is sort of the point. Congratulations: You’re learning a language.
There is a range of sister options for the gender star (mei:ne bes_ter Freun*din or “my best friend”). For algorithm and aesthetic reasons, I like to use the colon. The colon is also easier to digest for reading software for the blind and visually impaired.
Fun fact: My vernacular, Swiss German, does not have official grammar rules, which makes it much harder to learn. Non-native speakers cannot attain full fluency. My Dutch husband could tell many tales of the annoyances of living in a country where spoken and written languages are different.
And yet, over time, change can happen. Think of how “Ms.” has replaced “Miss” and “Mrs.” relatively completely.
If you are unfamiliar with “ESH,” you may not know about the best internet forum in the world, Reddit’s “Am I The Asshole.” Sort for Top Posts, find gems like this one and lose days of your life. You’re welcome.
Luckily, I don’t have the kind of public profile where getting canceled would be a realistic possibility. Whew.
An example of what not to do: Have you ever tried speaking French in France? People are so MEAN when you get their precious grammar wrong. I’ve had many an old French lady pretend she can’t understand what I’m saying.