A French backlash against a gender inclusive pronoun ‘iel’.

[ScrollingLeaves]

A French minister has objected to the pronoun ‘iel’ being added to the Robert dictionary.

Do any Mnetters living in France have a view about how prevalent the erosion of language is in France? Are they talking about ‘people who menstruate’ etc?

French dictionary accused of ‘wokeism’ over gender-inclusive pronoun | France | The Guardian

www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/17/french-dictionary-wokeism-gender-inclusive-pronoun-iel
amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/17/french-dictionary-wokeism-gender-inclusive-pronoun-iel

Not in france but find it amusing that even a nb pronoun has a masculine and a feminine form! Think it's most unlikely to catch on, given how gendered french is as a language.

Yes, you do wonder how using neutral pronouns would feel given all the gendered words in the language.

The French are using the franglais ‘Le wokisme’. I don’t know if they as a country are experiencing the erosion of women’s rights, and the endangering young people with ‘affirmation’ therapies we have here.

I think Italy and Spain are under the same pressures in general, but am not sure what is happening within their languages.

What does Académie Française have to say about this?

In French, breast - le sein - is masculine and beard - la barbe - is feminine. There is no sense to it.

Interesting. I lived in France when younger, and my family are still there but they're mainly farmers and highly unlikely to have embraced le wokisme - 😀

It would actually be really useful to have a non-gendered 3rd person plural pronoun and less sexist than the current arrangement, which is that, even if you have 999,999 women in a group and 1 man, you use "ils' (masculine) to mean 'they' - i.e. the masculine always trumps the feminine. So I don't think it's a crazy idea in principle. However, according to this online dictionary, that's not what is happening. 'Iel/iels' is being used to mean people who consider themselves not to have a gender, or whose gender is unknown. It is not being used as a gender-neutral term generally. So it's the equivalent of using 'they' for a singular non-binary person in English.

In answer to your broader question about whether women's rights are under attack in France, sadly, the answer is yes. Paris, after all, was the epicentre of the post-modernism theology that got us into this mess.

"iel" sounds seriously sexist. Why not "ielle"?
It reinforces the notion of male as default and female as secondary, so can't see it receiving much support. It will just pit feminists against genderists, while everyone else shrugs.

@SocialConnection

In French, breast - le sein - is masculine and beard - la barbe - is feminine. There is no sense to it.

That's true of most nouns, but not those denoting people or specifying an animal of a particular sex, e.g. it's un chat (masculine) if you mean any old cat but une chatte if you mean a female cat specifically (though that's a word to be used with caution in France as it has the same connotations as pussy..)

Not sure how prevalent so called inclusive language is , but when it comes to Cervical cancer and screening " femme" and " fille" still being used.

Il existe deux moyens complémentaires de limiter ce risque :

"un test de dépistage pour toutes les femmes de 25 à 65 ans,
une vaccination contre les papillomavirus humains (HPV), recommandée pour toutes les jeunes filles et, depuis janvier 2021, pour tous les jeunes garçons, de 11 à 14 ans avec un rattrapage vaccinal possible jusqu'à 19 ans.

www.e-cancer.fr/Comprendre-prevenir-depister/Se-faire-depister/Depistage-du-cancer-du-col-de-l-uterus

Sorry forgot link from L' Institut national du Cancer

I think that L’Academie Francaise doesn’t like it. From this article,

www.independent.co.uk/news/french-academie-francaise-sparks-paris-france-b1960403.html
www.independent.co.uk/news/french-academie-francaise-sparks-paris-france-b1960403.html?amp

It is,” they added, “also a way of confronting the Academie Francaise that stays in its conservative corner and continues to ignore and scorn users of the French language.”

Then there is this 2017 article in French by a trans woman French Canadian making fun of the Academie Francaise for objecting to changing the French language for the sake of inclusivity. I can see there is not only ‘iel’ and ‘ielle’ but inclusive language also get away from gender in nouns by adding alternatives separated by full stops as in ‘l’étudiant·e ‘.
medium.com/@florence.ashley/lacad%C3%A9mie-fran%C3%A7aise-et-le-fran%C3%A7ais-inclusif-la-crise-pu%C3%A9rile-d-une-institution-d%C3%A9su%C3%A8te-a951300b412a

I thought maybe a Mumsnet person from France might know more generally about what is happening there on these issues as I am ignorant when it comes to our neighbour across the channel.

I live in France. I’m a secondary school teacher. Never heard it used in the wild. Even by the teenagers. There’s a couple of them in each year group who have gone hard on LGBTQ+ stuff, but literally a couple. Most people would just scoff a bit about it.

Caveat - I live somewhere pretty rural, lots of them are the children of farmers/farm workers.

But I do know a couple of people desperate to demonstrate their woke cred who insist on saying «as a cis, hetero, white....» before giving their opinion. And being super right on about performatively explaining to their children that just because you’re born a girl doesn’t mean you have to grow up to be a woman etc. But they raise eyebrows. And they’re the kind of people who like to explain that they watch films in the original language without subtitles. I think they assume they’re well ahead of the curve by early adoption of an American value.

Interestingly I had a massive falling out with one couple like this this summer. I spent the weeks with them and realised he’s a giant narcissist and emotionally manipulates his wife. And announced this summer he’d had a revelation and he’s actually demisexual, to rapturous support from his wife... so they’re not selling it. (Also I started a thread because of them after they totally defended all prostitution, denied that nice men do it, and then the wife said she’d happily pay for sex )

Younger people are starting to refer to groups based on the majority sex. Before, a group of girls changed to masculine with just 1 male. So 250,000 women and 1 man and the word changed to the masculine. They’re rejecting that now and going with the majority. Small steps.

Oh, also the word for person is «une personne», so all associated adjectives would have to be feminine. So «toute personne ayant un col d’utérus» (everyone person with a uterus) would lead to «est invitée à faire un dépistage» still all in the feminine. I don’t think it would have the female erasure effect they would like

@LadyCampanulaTottington

Younger people are starting to refer to groups based on the majority sex. Before, a group of girls changed to masculine with just 1 male. So 250,000 women and 1 man and the word changed to the masculine. They’re rejecting that now and going with the majority. Small steps.

Ah, that's awesome. It has always really bugged me.

That interesting LadyCampanula - and glad to hear it - but changing to feminine when there is a female majority, is a bit different from trying to find a word or pronoun to fit different gender identities including non binary.

FongonTheValiant, that seems reassuring but I wonder if Paris would be very different? Otherwise it seems reassuring.

In Spain, what ever is happening in the language, recent protests by women are testimony to them experiencing appalling misogyny and pressure to erode their spaces in favour of trans ideologies.

Interesting. My son asked me this week what pronouns a non-binary person would use in France or Spain and I had no clue.

“FingonTheValiant
Oh, also the word for person is «une personne», so all associated adjectives would have to be feminine. So «toute personne ayant un col d’utérus» (everyone person with a uterus) would lead to «est invitée à faire un dépistage» still all in the feminine. I don’t think it would have the female erasure they would like 😀”

FingonTheValiant, that is very satisfying!

@ScrollingLeaves I live in Suisse Romande so Swiss French is slightly different to French French

We’re very close to the French border and DD has friends from both sides. I’ve never heard them use “inclusive French” but they speak Franglais anyway or English as they’re all 3rd culture kids.

LadyCampanula
Is your daughter in an age group where girls might be thinking they are non-binary or really boys if they were in England?

If so, have you heard of that happening where you are?

@FKATondelayo

Interesting. My son asked me this week what pronouns a non-binary person would use in France or Spain and I had no clue.

I have no idea from personal experience, but I've just Googled, and it looks as if there isn't a settled approach in France, equivalent to using 'they' here. You have to ask the NB person's preference.

Strictly speaking, there already is a gender-neutral 3rd person singular in French - on. But it is used much more as a 1st person plural, to mean 'we', so it would be super-confusing to start using it instead of 'they'. I can't see that that's a viable option, so maybe the Academie's fight against iel will hold pronoun madness at bay!

I'm not French but friends with a French couple who live with an NB person who goes by the French equivalent of She/Her. She's not biologically female so I'm not sure why she chose them, but probably because there's no equivalent to they/them that makes sense in French. She's not a woman so I guess is referred to as person?

Hooray. The absurd and unnecessary embedding of gender into the ordinary operation of our language is one of the reasons we're in this ridiculous situation in the first place. Why on Earth, every time I want to say that somebody went to the shop to buy a pound of butter, do I have to begin by specifying what bits they have between their legs? It's a massive testament to the power of universal consistent social conditioning that people actually think that is sane.

Maybe if the French can do it (considering that their language is so much more widely infused with gender crap than ours), we will have the sense to follow suit.

I would be very interested to know this too.

I know in Germany the Greens and the SPD are very pro self ID etc.

I came across iel recently and was a bit perplexed.

Just wondering how it would work for agreements and reflexive verbs etc.

I think an agreement might be something like
‘gentil.le.s’