Pride is a yearly event that takes place in a host of cities around the world. It celebrates diversity of sexuality and freedom of expression in this matter. Many of the strongest critics are those who still see the world in binary (male/female), and do not wish their view of life to be challenged. But they are failing to hold back the tide. This month, the management of the London Underground decided to abandon announcements that start with "ladies and gentlemen" and instead say "hello everyone". This is a step into the future, not a left-wing language coup.
Who says we should say "ladies and gentlemen" rather than "gentlemen and ladies"? Why do we start a formal letter with "Dear Sir / Madam" rather than "Dear Madam / Sir"? Where have those standards of etiquette gone these days? Surely women should always go first, no matter how illogical the sequence? And isn't everything male or female? Why are we being told there's this new non-binary gender? It's just the current trend, obviously, being run by left-wing ideologues to subvert the world order and bring down the system.
Well, not quite. In fact, not at all.
This is simply the way the world has been going. For many years, anything that contradicted the status quo was disapproved of, frowned upon, buried under other news or even carried the threat of a criminal record. Lots of people who were forced into heterosexual relationships or marriage in the past because it was expected of them lived in terrible depression and anxiety because they felt pressurised into this, and a great deal of those who are now in their forties and above have seized their chances to realign more appropriately with their orientation in this newly-open societal change. Young people today realise who they are much earlier, and all to the good. In many countries this is now clearly not the case, but the proliferation of this multi-gender, rainbow-coloured society can only continue now that it does not carry quite the stigma it once did (and only recently). However, it will be harder in a lot more countries than it is in others.
Why?
Gender grammar in language is one of the greatest obstacles.
The predominantly three-gender or common and neuter Germanic and genderless Anglophone countries are the main drivers of this new trend. Gender-neutral languages like English make it much easier to accept the idea of multiple sexuality. Latin-based languages like French and Spanish put everything and everyone exclusively into categories of masculine and feminine, even categorising more traditionally male/female objects in their grammar - la table, la maison, la cuisine (women in French should be in the house), le travail, le problème (only men work and solve problems in French, apparently), el tiempo, el muro (men only can tell the time and build walls in Spanish), la mesa, la flor (women in Spanish should take care of flowers on their tables at home). This happens in many languages and will not disappear overnight. So it is much harder for speakers of two-gender languages to conceive of more genders. Society puts great pressure on people to follow the herd, but we are starting to see changes brought about by changing attitudes and the raising of awareness of issues to do with gender and sexuality. Only the most judgemental of people are causing a delay in the progress and advancement of society, with language a vital tool in the battle to change hearts and minds.
German and Dutch throw up oddities, like the word for girl, which is Mädchen and meisje respectively. Due to -chen and -je endings signifying pejoratives, which are always categorised as neutral, girls in these languages, paradoxically, are grammatically not considered female. When asking "where is the girl?" in German,"wo ist das Mädchen?" it is still not uncommon to hear "it is here" ("Es ist hier") as a reply.
In English, there has been a shift towards using "they" for non-binary people, and this is catching on quite rapidly. However, language has been a powerful tool in establishing norms for centuries, so it may be much more difficult for French or Spanish speakers to get used to this idea. In French and Spanish even the word "they" is split by gender: ils/ellos, elles/ellas. This is why the idea of gender is easier for English speakers. German and Dutch, as well as the Slavic languages, with their notions of neutral gender will also find the transition from binary much easier. I believe this is why countries like Poland have always had such a high number of women in employment, and why Scandinavia is the home of linguistic sexual experimentation, where parents in some places are encouraged not to teach gender distinction to their children.
This is clearly not a phenomenon that is typical of whole countries and the speakers thereof. There are most certainly a great number of people in countries with genderless or multi-gender languages who still think in binary. They can be those who never thought of the idea before, but would not be against it, or they can be traditionalists who believe only in heterosexual marriage. They might be religious, they might be political (or both), but they are clearly shrinking in number as exposure to more and more non-binary people is becoming commonplace, especially in the big cities. All opinions and theories are there to be challenged, and now that it is becoming clearer that the pressure put on people for a very long time to blend in with established "norms" has caused untold misery and resentment down the years, we can finally do something about making amends for this. Medical and scientific research has highlighted that many children, some very young, feel uncomfortable with the gender they are born into. Fortunately, this world we are living in now is more equipped to deal with people's orientation than ever before. We just need languages to change with the times too.
Some genderless languages:
Afrikaans
Burmese
Chinese
English
Estonian
Finnish
Hungarian
Japanese
Korean
Mongolian
Persian
Thai
Turkish
Some languages with masculine and feminine genders only:
Arabic (with some exceptions)
French
Hebrew
Hindi
Irish
Italian
Latvian
Lithuanian (with some exceptions)
Spanish
Welsh
Some languages with masculine, feminine and neuter:
Bulgarian
Croatian
Dutch (although with the article de being used for both masculine and feminine, they are barely distinguishable any more)
German
Greek
Gujarati
Icelandic
Norwegian (with some regional exceptions)
Russian
Czech, Polish and Slovak (Western Slavic languages) have three genders, but also distinguish between the animate and the inanimate
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