I’m becoming more and more disgruntled with the expectation that I conform to what I see as increasingly rigid political correctness (although, I’m thinking it’s no longer called “political correctness” because maybe that phrase or one of the words offends 0.000093% of the population”).

I had a fun (and funny!) lesson with a 25-year-old student, explaining to him that non-binary people want to be called “they” in English so as to remove the taint of gender. We couldn’t decide if we would use the first-person-singular of the verb if there was only one person, or if we should use first-person-plural to match the “they” pronoun. They goes vs. they go. They is vs. they are. Don’t want to offend the numerically-sensitive.

Then we moved on to the same questions but for Spanish – where all nouns have a gender and the article (a, an, the, etc.) and the adjective (red, hot, fast, tall, etc.) have masculine and feminine forms which must match the noun/pronoun used (gender and numerical-sensitivity).

A masculine and feminine form, but not neutral form (as I’ve been told is present in German). So, is Spanish now expected to spontaneously generate a new neutral pronoun plus all the non-gendered articles and adjectives associated? He’s going to ask one of his more “woke” friends about the plans to combat this looming crisis and report back.

This is also the student that explained to me, in a previous class when we were discussing cultural differences, the path Spanish women took in their Liberation journey.

In the US, my recollection is that the Women’s Lib movement espoused the ideal that women should not be treated differently from men by insisting that women doing the same work shouldn’t be called a different title than men. So the suffix “-ess” became a symbol of the denigration of women’s contributions and male toxicity. Yada yada yada, so many burnt foundation garments later, now we have only Ac-Tors. Ta daaaaah! Triumph through inclusivity.

In Spain the tactic was opposite. Since nouns all have genders, and since many jobs were only done by men, some jobs only had the male gender word. Doctor or attorney, for example. And women who became doctors or attorneys refused to use the male word, insisting that a female version be created for their use. So that anyone reading their name in the phone book or on a sign on the door would know that yes, this is a doctor who is a female. Triumph through exclusivity.  

I think it’s interesting to consider that the basic grammar of a language might play a part in different responses being utilized in a worldwide issue affecting more than 50% of the global population.