So how are things going in Germany?

I've never heard anyone use that term. In ordinary everyday situations people (where I live and work anyway) only use Geschlecht and really don't clarify.

I just wanted to say that as a non native but fluent German speaker living in Germany (my work is 100% in German) I think the language problem in discussing this issue is more basic than has been discussed so far - in everyday conversation there is no word to make the distinction between biological sex and gender.

Im in a very traditional area of Germany, quite a long way from the nearest big city, and work in a social work related field...
It creates quite an interesting situation with a disproportionate number of quite alternative people who very much want to be inclusive (mostly - a few of them not so much with foreigners) in a quite traditional setting... A few months ago a colleague told me in so many words that there's a new agency worker in a department we work with who is "a woman who used to be a man... well you know what I mean, tranman - nah transfrau oder? and anyway he... she... seems very nice ..." but that was a totally unselfconscious and unthought through blurt!

I have only had one really interesting conversation on this subject because everyone very much watches what they say - but I have a young, gay, male colleague who I got into a discussion with (he is open to trying to see other people's points of view and we have some common ground on completely unrelated things where we've been of the same opinion and backed one another, but he is very much TWAW) . I tried to explain that I think gender is a social construct and I only define myself as a woman because of my biology and the experiences of living my whole life with this biology. It's not the easiest discussion to have in German because if you say sex that means the act of having sex or sexual things, and sexuality is a big topic but that's sexual orientation - Geschlecht is just used for both biological sex and gender. To have the conversation I had to clarify what exactly I meant and that in English gender never means biological sex.

If you only have one word in use in ordinary everyday language which doesn't allow you to make the distinction between sex and gender thinking gets muddy!

He did agree he couldn't define what living as a woman actually meant, after I said I live as a woman because I'm experiencing menopause and have a body which has been through pregnancy and childbirth, and because I live with knowledge of the hit my pension took due to multiple maternity leaves and complying with the social expectation that I as the mother would be the parent to work part time until the children were all at Kindergarten... He accused me of being negative about being a woman though... I don't think I changed his mind, but how can anyone discuss or even think properly if Geschlecht, meaning gender, is the only word available?

I visited my friend (a scientist) in Berlin about 6 months ago and while she said they had had all of the same discussions and media frenzy to the point of distraction over it, she said it had calmed down in the news and she was more worried about the rise in the far right.

I've said it before multiple times but you can't get any further right than men taking away rights from 51% of the population.

Thanks - found it now.

This is the title of the other thread:
"German Police Officer being taken to court for "faking trans identity" "

no, it's there, but I noticed the problem, too. I don't know why.
If you go through forum posts on the first or second page, you should see it (I hope).

Has that post been taken down? When I click on the link I get an error message 404.

Ha, that's what I get for not looking thoroughly - sorry about that.

@Maerchentante

someone made a thread about that, here's more:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5442355-german-police-officer-being-taken-to-court-for-faking-trans-identity?reply=148491942

(I now get an error message when clicking this link, I don't know why, but you'll find the topic on here :) )

But the FAZ article is new and it hasn't been mentioned yet that the difference was 43 places, which is a lot.

Edit:
the archive.is now has the Spiegel-article, if you want to post it over there, too:
https://archive.is/AF5wA

I just came across this topic on the Spiegel website, but it's behind a paywall, not available on archive, either. Searched and found a free version on the FAZ website:
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/kriminalitaet/hat-ein-polizist-das-geschlecht-fuer-die-befoerderung-gewechselt-110777218.html

Bascially a police officer changed his gender marker at the registry office and the police are disputing that this was genuine as the person jumped 43 places in the "promotion waitlist". The police then put a stop to further promotions of this person as "TIM" had mentioned that they were doing this to enhance their chances of advancing at a quicker pace.
First court case the person won, police were told they had to promote this person. Police then immediately put another "do not promote" flag on this person's file because they'd heard that this officer wanted to get the promotion as a woman, then "transition" back go get married as a man.

Sorry if this is not the best summary, it's been a long week and my brain does not want to co-operate.

That's an author I can highly recommend. I think those linguists researching German language I mentioned were also influenced by her.
Here's an overview over her work:
https://frauenkultur.co.uk/tag/dale-spender/

From the topics, you can see that many things we take now for granted have been fought over just a few decades ago (and are still ongoing).

@Igneococcus

Wasn't that excluded in the law, precisely for the problem you mention?

I'm no longer willing to consider any study results where I can't see the methodology. I'm also fast losing interest in anything that hasn't been solidly replicated. The mess in academic research didn't suddenly crop up in the last 10 or 15 years, it's a long-standing, serious problem.

May have been included in Dale Spender's Man Made Language? She was an absolute star, so good at making seemingly abstruse linguistic texts clear and accessible to the lay reader.

It is a long time ago, but I read a linguistic study that asked children to draw "mankind" and they only drew men, while when they asked them to draw "human kind", they also drew women. So terms like "manpower" and "manhole cover" not only make women invisible in language, but likely have real life consequences.

Just a few minutes ago I came across a trailer about a documenterary on FB. It's by Arte, a channel which is a French-German cooperation and it's about a lingerie boutique in Israel. They had a TIM being fitted for the first bra. Quite a few people in the comments were "how brave, how stunning" but there was also push back. At least two women mentioned Malaga Airport.
Of course, some of the more critical comments had a whiff of right wing extremist, but there is dissent and I think the amount of people pushing back will only grow. A lot of women I know are GC but wouldn't dare to voice that in the open for fear of their jobs, me included.
While my subsidiary is quite "old fashioned", the wider company is pretty "bring your whole self to work" and "everyone is who they say they are", so if you want to progress, it's hard if you stick your head above the parapet.
Ironically, it's a very male dominated industry, at our location not even a fifth of the work force are women, and most of those are in office based jobs. Only one female engineer and a handful of women in production.
From documentaries I've seen about our products and pictures on the intranet, it seems to be the same in other locations, at least when it comes to production.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel, or so it seems. For the last few years TW were featured in everything that had anything to do with EDI, even in the widest sense. This year, none. We are an international company, HQ is in another EU country, a few locations in the UK and they seem to be pushing back bit by bit. Hopefully, Germany will follow before too long.

I'm predicting a wave of German men declaring themselves to be female in the very near future:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/cf5aa17e-cfe6-44ad-b673-76978003964d?shareToken=41573740c9ddc06b7171005618621312

@Delphin

Yeah, that’s the problem, women would then be included when it’s most unrealistic, such as in crimes that are committed 95% by men. Same problem as what’s now protested when transwomen commit a crime and the reporting says “her” and “she”, and women protest that these are not our crimes.

I get what you mean, and I concede that the situation is not as bad with regard to the meaning of the generic masculinum as it used to be, according to earlier research (from the 70s/80s), but I don’t think it’s yet applicable to all situations.

If you think for example of the campaigns which addressed teenage girls and young women for studying MINT subjects and going into these careers, they (obviously) featured photos of young women and school-age girls and often used the feminine terms: “Werde Physikerin” (become a physicist). And I have the impression that it’s probably more likely to think of a group of women and men when talking about fields which nowadays feature a lot of women (such as politics), but less likely when you talk about “Baggerfahrer” or “Geologen” (excavator operator / geologists).

I haven’t read Die Zeit for a while, so I wasn’t aware, thanks for updating me. But alternating this within an article sounds even more confusing.

I wasn’t entirely serious with the idea, as I said, as it’s equally inaccurate, but would be fun in contexts such as politicians, for example, where men dominated for a long time.

For background information, the linguistic researcher I mentioned earlier, Luise F. Pusch was working with a second researcher, Senta Trömel-Plötz.

Both their works contributed to feminist linguistics. And I have looked up an interview with the latter, from the 90s (in German), which shows in a lively way that just a few decades ago, the situation in Germany was very different with regard to who is meant, who is included and how language and social situation of women was interwoven, and that’s what I am aiming at with my posts on this thread.

https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/709723.wirklichkeit.html

More recent interviews with Luise F. Pusch:
https://www.emma.de/artikel/das-gendern-ist-ein-irrweg-341963

https://www.nzz.ch/nzz-am-sonntag-magazin/weshalb-die-gender-pionierin-luise-f-pusch-heute-genderkritisch-ist-ld.1772933

Bio of Senta Trömel-Plötz (in English)
https://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/senta-troemel-ploetz/

and a great overview over “geschlechtergerechte Sprache” in Germany, but including international influences:
https://frauenmediaturm.de/neue-frauenbewegung/geschlechtergerechte-sprache/

Sorry that some resources are only in German, but I hope it’ll be interesting for someone.

@Toutafait

I agree with @Delphin in that people mostly are aware that one term covers both male and female people, but it’s still inherently unfair. I think the awareness also varies within the population. Someone who posts on this board is much more politically interested than other groups of people. And I still think when it comes to prestigious roles within society, the male plural is firstly understood as “mostly male people”.

With regard to making up new words, we usually don’t have to. The female words have been existing almost as long, it’s normal to have both a female and male word for occupations. But sometimes the female word only came into existence when women fought their way into an occupation, such as doctors or mechanics, and the ending "-in" is added.

But we had to create entirely new words when males came into a predominantly female profession, for example nursing was almost entirely staffed with women, they are called “Krankenschwester” (sister (probably derived from religious orders) who cares for the sick).

When men started to join, a new term was created, “Krankenpfleger” (carer for the sick), instead of “Krankenbruder”, which would have been the logical choice. So we made up new words for men. Then the term for men was adapted for females, too: Krankenpfleger & Krankenpflegerin.

The same happened for assistant roles in GP practices and roles in kindergartens.

I've been searching via duckduckgo for German news reports on the IOC decision to ban transgender men (transwomen) from female events.

...tumbleweed...

Only BILD reported yesterday morning, and Schwulissimo (gay newssite), plus a handful of small sites like a catholic newspaper and msn.de. duckduckgo.com/?q=ioc+trans+frauen+olympiade&df=w&t=euandroid&ia=news&iar=news&ndf=w

Nothing on the major German newspapers from left to right, or in the weeklies (Spiegel, Zeit, Focus)...

@ForestAtTheSea "However, just for fun, we could use the female plural only and tell men they are included, in return for what they did before, maybe for the next 100 years."

Well, that is what for example "Die Zeit" does. Using the feminin as a general term and changing between feminin and masculin in the same article. Which led me to write a scathing comment to an article about the British colonial rule in India, where they had used "Britinnen" in a spot that clearly referred to British civil servants and soldiers in India. Which were at that point 100% men.

Doesn't work, because except for a (tiny) minority who think that grammatical gender = sex (or even gender), Germans instinctively understand the generic masculin as a form to include all, and the femininum to only mean women. If we don't want people to play around with the meaning of words (e.g. women) we also shouldn't allow them to play around and change the structure of grammar of our language, par ordre de mufti.

Its perfectly serviceable to say Briten und Britinnen if one needs to name both and is disgusted by grammatical gender...

@Toutafait I answered most of your question in the post before you - maybe go one step back. I mentioned women's fights for language because this is specific to the German language and our history, and not directly comparable to English.

I am not a fan, but not because it includes non-binary and other people, but because women become invisible in this new language. Separate terms for women and men and mentioning both when adressing a group is the most accurate.
Trans people are included because realistically they are either a man or a woman. Feelings are not included because the terms are for biologically distinct groups. It's not possible ask everyone how they feel today before adressing a big group, as according to TQ logic, the way someone identifies can change anytime (and change back anytime, too).

The version with the participle is also a big problem as you cannot use it coherently.

For a group of people, the term often used to end with “-schaft” (a specific group), such as “Ärzteschaft”, “Lehrerschaft”, “Schülerschaft” [doctors, teachers, pupils, always m&f plural) but you cannot transplant these terms to all situations, because they refer to the group of people at a specific location (let’s say a specific school), not all pupils in the country, for example.

But on the other hand, you cannot use the participle term in all situations, either, such as “Lesende” (readers, reading in action), it sounds silly, as people aren’t reading 24/7, but equally “Leserschaft” refers to the readers of a specific author, their fans, describing a specific group.

And drivers of a car or bus cannot be “Fahrende” (people who drive), as that is an old-fashioned term referring to (European) travellers. Implementing the participle for all kinds of topics runs into problems at every corner.

The most fair and inclusive wording is still mentioning both male and female plural terms, it’s especially advantageous for women because they are then equally visible and their 50% of the population is acknowledged instead of just “included”, as in the olden times when only the male plural was used for a group of people and it was pretended that it’s inclusive.

The fact that now there is a differentiation proves that exactly wrong, because if they had been included the decades before, then you wouldn’t have needed to change it. However, just for fun, we could use the female plural only and tell men they are included, in return for what they did before, maybe for the next 100 years.

By the way, the wording changed when women demanded entry into male-only fields, such as universities or politics (remember, women weren’t permitted to study at universities once). At that time, saying “Studenten” or “Ärzte” (both male plural form) was describing reality. This also proves the story of women being included into male plural terms wrong.