Can a Bill Have a Gender? Feminine Wording Exposes a Rift

Can a Bill Have a Gender? Feminine Wording Exposes a Rift

NYTimes | By Christopher F. Schuetze | Oct. 15, 2020

Last month, the Justice Ministry presented a draft of the bill, which aims to shield debtors and businesses from insolvency in the wake of the coronavirus. While the bill drew little attention at the time, the draft language was written employing “Femininum,” a grammatical device that includes the use of the feminine form of plural nouns to describe groups that include both men and women.

An equivalent in English would be to refer to a group of both male and female actors collectively as “actresses.”

A dispute over grammar between two federal ministries has reopened a front in Germany’s longstanding battle about gender equality, forcing officials to redraft a debt protection bill.

(Photo: Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, left, Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht, center, and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in Berlin on Wednesday. Credit...Pool photo by Henning Schacht)

On Monday, the Interior Ministry announced that the draft would be rejected based on its use of the generic feminine form, dealing a blow to those who say the usual masculine marginalizes people who do not identify as men. In a country like Germany, where gender norms remain entrenched, the dispute shows how the traditional norms of language can become an obstacle to equality.
Christine Lambrecht, the justice minister who rolled out the draft bill, ran into resistance from the interior minister, Horst Seehofer, who warned that the document’s language could, in legal terms, exclude men from its protections. Steve Alter, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said that Mr. Seehofer’s objections were focused solely on the question of whether it was legally valid to use such language in a bill.

“The generic feminine for use for female and male people has not yet been linguistically recognized,” Mr. Alter said. “This applies completely independently of whether a certain social state is desired.”

German has gendered nouns — masculine, feminine and neutral — but as in several other European languages, the masculine form takes precedence when referring to groups of men and women, especially on official and legal documents.