No war, no emergency is too bitter for a silly debate about the spelling of man, woman and diverse. The CDU now wants to ban the authorities from gendering. Experienced law professors abseil into the most boring of all debates. Nothing like afterwards.
Gendern is annoying: There are the small pauses of some radio presenters - "Viewer - pause - inside", the so-called glottic stop. There are the asterisks that activists throw at their audience, linguistic contortions that seem so natural as if you sat down at the table, put one leg behind your head, combed your hair with a fork and asked the group: "Is what?"
And, man, does gendering infuriate! It provokes the feeling that someone here wants to teach others. Whether the activists want it or not, every little pause sounds like "I'm further along than you are" in the ears of gender opponents, every asterisk supposedly says "you're a reactionary primitive".
Gentle: I'm not one of those people where every glottic beat turns into a rash. I don't have to bang the dishes on the wall in anger with every printed asterisk. As a moderator, I even tried the gender break myself and at some point decided that I'd rather address both genders occasionally - and, yes, so that all the different genders just "mean".
If a client wants gender to be used in a speech, then I write the star or gap in the manuscript. I don't have to take a cold shower afterwards or remove the mirrors in the house out of shame. Wherever I have to make editorial decisions, "laissez-faire" applies. If I write myself, I don't gender. Live and let live.
And so you could just let things go on without comment, wait until this or that trend dies down or just solidifies. However, there is a small problem: the activism of many has meanwhile become less of an occasional compulsion. While minority rights are essential to our democracy, there is one thing they are not: majority rights. As long as gender does not prevail, there can be no question of language developing further. Presumably just as many people use the youth word "cringe" (which is old again) as the glottal stop. That is not enough.
The compulsion is real: examples from universities and authorities are currently being laboriously listed by the "world". Last week ZDF presenter Andrea "Kiwi"kievel fueled the debate when she slipped out an "I have to". This will not necessarily be due to public law constraints, but to a certain pressure of expectations. In the private sector, this gender pressure falls under the waiter principle: what you order is served, it is decided who pays. In the case of the public service media, things are not that simple: we pay, but we don't decide.
So one can definitely feel sympathy for those who don't feel like gendering, but have to. But that is something completely different than the mere pain of confrontation. If you, as an employee, can get so upset about gendered corporate communication that you go to court, like an Audi employee did recently, this can actually only be explained by galactic boredom.
Words are bearable, that's how it is in a free society. But the most insane among us are most afraid of words: "I should fall into a vegetative state, someone wrote to me, so that my family would always have to live between hope and fear, and I should be in pain," journalist Nicole Diekmann reported recently about one Anti-gender rager. What some need the "Satanic Verses" for, others just need a pause in speaking. Both cases pose a threat to liberal society.
In the meantime, there have been countless attempts to pass the question on to higher powers: linguistics, the Basic Law, the legislature. Here a text defending the generic masculine, there a professional dismissing it as "a tradition of usage based on tacit understanding". However, science does not solve the language problem. The linguist Damaris Nübling, who recently published in the F.A.S. admitted that many experts did not comment at all - because the public discussion was "not particularly stimulating".
Law professors write many expert opinions to find out whether the tedious gender question gets a constitutional answer: Do we have to gender? Can you change? Don't you have to be allowed to gender?
Regardless of a constitutional mandate, the CDU Hamburg is now resorting to the last resort against language compulsion, namely the statutory language compulsion: authorities should be prohibited from gendering. As a political lever, gendering is really seductive: It is a debate nexus that can be used to break down the entire exploding current overload to a single asterisk. You can't ignore gender - the conservatives don't have much else left.
Classic conservative values such as straightforwardness and tolerance would offer sufficient instruments against asterisks and little breaks without using the power of the state: straightforwardness and tolerance demand on the one hand the opponents of gender not to degrade gender activists - and on the other hand the activists not to kowtow every objection before the patriarchy to label. Those who do not want to gender should straighten up and resolutely reject corresponding demands, but put up with the gendering of others.
Especially in the male-dominated CDU, however, there should be understanding when people enforce equality and anti-discrimination through nerves. After all, the ex-CDU chairwoman didn't put herself at the top by politely asking, but fought and, quite coolly, cleared a whole row of men.
So all in all it's very simple: Let the people (m/f/d) change. It's just words, asterisks, pauses. Don't push her.
There are really more important things.
