Gendered nouns and gender ideology in other languages - can anyone here answer my question?

[mauvish]

English doesn't have gendered nouns. I think boats are always "she"; I can't think of any other examples at all. Similarly we don't then have to alter adjectives or ay verb forms to match the gendered noun.

But many other languages have at least 2 genders to their nouns, or even 3 (masc, fem, neuter) (There may be others with more but I'm not aware of them).

So in English, if we talk about a man but refer to him as "she" (for example), it stands out. And this flavours the debate over the issue.

Does this have a similar impact in other languages? Un homme isn't going to be une homme (or in the circumstances, is it?) I guess they "become" une femme and everything else about them linguistically also has to be feminine? How does a "lady dick" work, linguistically, where "lady" (fem) SHOULD agree with "dick" (masc) but doesn't? (other examples are, I'm sure, available!)

I kind of feel that where everything else in the sentence is used in the "neuter" sense, it can both dilute and amplify the effect of calling a person by their non-birth sex, but maybe the opposite might be true in gendered languages? Does anyone know?

No idea but my very GNC and now fully fledged feminist friend's daughter walked out of French in protest once because she declared that the language was too sexist 🤩

She later carefully chose a back back for duke of Edinburgh awards that was engineered for women's bodies. We are so proud of her. I think she simply rolls her eyes at gender stuff.

I have wondered about this. We have he/ she/ it. If it’s not a he or a she, then it’s an it. Other languages assign gender to everything.

(But why of why don’t we use 'it' for non binary instead of the twee 'they')

I'm English but teach a few European languages. I admit I'm not super up on what's going on with the language around the gender debate in other countries, but I don't think your examples would actually cause a problem. If a trans-identifying man considers himself a woman, he'd call himself e.g. in French une femme.

The lady dick thing <shudder> wouldn't necessarily cause a language gender problem, because genders of things (as opposed to people) are not related to the meaning or nature of the thing. So there's no particular reason why the word for a duck might not be feminine or breasts be masculine (they are in French).

Because it's dehumanising to refer to a person the same way you'd talk about a random object.

Speakers of some languages e.g. Spanish are trying to make the language more inclusive by eliminating noun gender when it refers to people. In traditional use of the language (and other Romance langs at least), if you have a group of 100 children comprising 99 girls and 1 boy, the group would be referred to using the "male" version of the noun e.g. "niños" (in contrast to "niñas", which means "girls"). Some people are advocating for a gender neutral version i.e. "niñes".

In your "lady dick" example, this is not really a term referring to a person. It refers to a thing, no?

Why are you proud of this? The French thing, not the backpack which makes sense?

I have a degree in Spanish but "dick" is not a word I use regularly (fancy that!) so I've just refreshed my memory - and you're right, it's feminine!

I guess there must be other languages where it's not?

I have several spanish/latino acquaintances, but I feel strangely disinclined to ask a question such as "como funciona un "lady dick" en espanol?" 😂

*Sorry, meant to say SOME speakers of some languages...

It's much more frequent to see "chic@s", "camarer@s" etc as a gender-inclusive way to write such words in Spanish.

But the grammatical gender of objects has nothing to do with human gender. Even among closely related languages (e.g. Spanish & Portuguese, which I can speak), the grammatical gender of many nouns is different

Yes true but there is a new wave of people advocating for a gender-neutral terms

Why is it?

For example, I might say, " what sex is it?' When referring to a baby.

'non binary' is dehumanising seeing as humans are either male or female.

We use "it" for a baby/child whose sex you don't know or where its sex isn't obvious. It's not supposed to be rude or dehumanising, it's just not usual to use "it" for a person over the age of about two.

And they would answer 'it's a boy/ girl!'

Using @ is more like a shorthand for including both -a and -o, rather than creating terms in their own right.

Snap, @ImDoingThisNow!

It's like "it" is the diminutive/juvenile form (don't know the correct term) of "they" which is what people say instead of "he or she" when talking about a hypothetical person or a person whose sex is not known.

And for your "lady dick" example, if it were literally translated into Spanish, surely it'd be something like "polla de mujer" (gramatically feminine) or "polla mujer" (most likely grammatically masculine as it's a compound noun). There's probably already a completely different term for it in Spanish though though and might vary from region to region...

In french:

Un pénis
Un vagin

Une bite
Une chatte

Make of that what you will (''correct" terms happen to be masculin, slang female in this case).

But as has already been said ''lady dick'' wouldn't really be any different I suppose, ''bite de femme'' maybe?

There's a new(ish) neutral pronoun to add to il (he) & elle (she): iel (non-binary).

We don't have the issue of misgendering in quite as many ways as in English, for example ''his pencil'' & ''her pencil' would both be ''son (his) crayon'', just as ''his rubber'' & ''her rubber'' would both be ''sa (her) gomme'' (crayon being a masculin noun, rubber a feminine one).

Using @ is more like a shorthand for including both -a and -o, rather than creating terms in their own right.

How would that work in speech though?

It doesn't 😁. People just end up saying both gendered noun forms to try to include everyone (which it still doesn't, really).

Why are you proud of this? The French thing, not the backpack which makes sense?

She's doing a French alevel now if that helps

She was young, 10/11, and took a stand against the fact that a French word was deemed masculine or feminine. She felt it was sexist. She was gender non conforming. She'd been getting messages that girls should do x and boys y which she saw as sexist too.

She got into a lot of trouble and her mum obviously told her off. And explained she had chosen the wrong protest (and in a very inappropriate way!) as they couldn't re write the French language. But secretly we were impressed that she even thought to question it.

She also successfully protested against the then uniform policy which disadvantaged girls. (in a more appropriate fashion via letters to governors.)

A bit off subject I know, but when I worked with a German girl, I asked her how she knew the gender of a new word, and therefore how to use it grammatically, bearing in mind that in German it's stuff like der Tisch masculine, the table. Like how do you know if it's der, die or das, if it's a word you don't know? And she, not so helpfully, replied that you "just know".

In France New words go through the Académie française who say whether they're masculin or feminine. Sometimes popular usage overturns that and both are acceptable. For example Covid (coronna virus disease , disease = maladie = feminine) should be la covid , but the vast majority of people say le covid .
Crisps is another one but with a more even split - I've heard un chips as many times as I've heard une chips (don't get me started on the plural which you can hear 🙄).

I got tangled up in this as I was climbing the peak but it is actually meaningless. There are no useful points of contact between grammatical gender and 'social' gender. The only thing that I can't understand is how preferred pronouns work in a gendered language. English speakers can say 'his table' or 'her table'. It is 'sa table' for both in French.

@DoAWheelie
'Because it's dehumanising to refer to a person the same way you'd talk about a random object.'

Dehumanising like menstruator or uterus haver?