27
QuestionHow do TIMs respond to being referred to as "ils" in France?
For those who don't know, French does not have a gender neutral third-person pronoun. For a group of men, it's "ils" and for women it's "elles".
Here's the kicker...
The pronoun for a mixed sex group is "ils".
I wonder if there have been any recorded trantrums over this?
I only know one French TIM and I think he is not particularly predisposed to talk to me 😂
But I don't think this would be an issue for them at all because it is just how the language works and is not directed at them (or at us) specifically.
You have to consider that there is gender of words and there is gender of people, and they are different things. French men are not upset at being described as "une personne" which is a feminine word, for instance. Likewise I doubt that German girls are upset about being called "das Mädchen" which is a neuter word.
Having said this there has been a woke movement in the French language which has tried to enforce "gender-neutral" language, which according to them means mixing up both the masculine and feminine forms every time there could be any ambiguity. So before there might have been a sign
Les intéressés sont priés de se présenter à la capitainerie
(People who are interested are asked to come forward to the harbormaster)
This uses only masculine forms because, as you point out, for mixed groups or unknown it defaults to masculine. But nowadays you increasingly see things like this:
Les intéressé·e·s sont prié·e·s de se présenter à la capitainerie
which is just a giant unreadable mess, and does not do sexual equality any services, because now feminists are seen as being troublemakers who are making everything complicated. Thanks wokies and libfems, you are shooting women's rights in the foot with this. It would have been better to stay with the original and just reiterate that word gender is not the same as person gender, OR, if you really really must, go the whole hog like Norway (bokmål) did and remove masculine and feminine gender from the language completely and replace it with common gender - note that the chances of this happening for the French language are very, very small.
Likewise I doubt that German girls are upset about being called "das Mädchen" which is a neuter word.
I gotta say, I do resent it a bit.
It's a diminutive. The actual word is "Maid", which isn't used anymore, and which meant anything from a little girl to an adult unmarried woman.
Male children aren't called a diminutive. Rather, they are called "Jungen", which roughly translates to "youths", and I suspect used to be gender neutral in German until it defaulted to male - "das Junge" is the young of any animal, "der Junge" is a young human.
Anyway, I think it is rather optimistic to expect TIMs to not throw mantrums about something because it is "just how the language works".
After all, that pronouns denote actual sex, not the gender identity in someone's head, is also how language works. And they sure do throw tantrums about that.
that pronouns denote actual sex, not the gender identity in someone's head, is also how language works. And they sure do throw tantrums about that.
You are right about this for sure.
As someone who has limited French knowledge, that second phrase still read as an unwieldy mess.
Les intéressé·e·s sont prié·e·s de se présenter à la capitainerie
And I thought french with all the nonspoken extra letters was already complicated. No way they could teach this in foreign schools as extra languages.
[Comment deleted]
Sure, or for a lawyer. But what I'm arguing is that it doesn't matter what gender the word is, the fact that someone says Maître or Docteur, or refers to someone as médécin or professeur or capitaine or officier, it doesn't matter that the word is masculine as long as there is not an instant assumption that only men can be doing these jobs, and I don't believe there is. It is fine to say "elle est capitaine de gendarmerie", this is normal and there is no cognitive dissonance there. It just happens that the word happens to be masculine, and that fact does not imply the sex of the person, i.e. it is not sexist. Unlike for instance, in English saying "her penis" - that is just oxymoronic.
What I am saying is that this woke tendency to assume that the gender of the word should reflect the sex of the person and that therefore there should be two or three words for everything in order to be properly "inclusive" actually sets back equality because you're just making it difficult for people and they will push back and view equality efforts overall as being a negative experience. Instead we need to be concentrating on getting representation of women in these roles to parity as much as possible, which is an educational and social effort in acceptance, and cannot be accomplished with a linguistic sleight of hand, especially one so ham-fisted (sorry for bad pun).
As I understand it, french TRAs are trying to popularize the gender neutral neopronouns "iel" and "iels", unfortunately.
They are trying yes but they mostly badly fail. Because French is so gendered; nouns, adjectives, verbs and pronouns, that bringing in a neutral element makes it impossible to talk at all
Same in Portugal, they invented the neopronoun "elu" (feminine is "Ela" and masculine is "Ele"). I have only seen it in writting though, never heard anyone using it verbally.
It's not an issue for them if the group is large enough. (Ex if a prof addresses a class of 300 as "ils", it is reasonable because there probably is at least one dude.)
If it is a small group then I imagine it could be a private issue if the TiM was the only man? I have known some french TiM and they never indicated this to be a problem.
But "ils" is used eveen if there are 49 women and one man in a group. If a TIM was that one man in the group, he would know that "ils" was being used because of him. Of course, he would have a tantrum.
*mantrum 🤣
[Comment deleted]