With a few minor exceptions, all English nouns denoting inanimate objects are gender-neutral. A husband is a he, his wife is a she, but their house and everything in it is an it.
That’s one reason English speakers struggle with perverse foreign tongues like French. How on earth are we supposed to know that in French the table is feminine and the bed is masculine? If those people had anything important to say, they’d say it in English anyway.
And if you think that someone who, like me, grew up speaking a gendered language doesn’t have such problems, you are mistaken.
Yes, Russian nouns have three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. So does German. So does Latin. French and Italian each have two. The trouble is that the same object may be masculine in one language and feminine in another.
The Russian table is a man and the Russian bed is a woman, but in French it’s the other way around. So how does speaking Russian help me figure out noun genders in French? No, I’ll stick to the comfortably uncontroversial English – “neither male nor female”, as St Paul said in a different context.
You’ll notice that I’ve barely scratched the surface of the pitfalls inherent to gendered languages. The pitfalls I mentioned are quite shallow anyway: what does it matter if I say le table to my French friends? They’ll know I mean la table and make allowances for my barbaric (meaning non-French) heritage.
No, the real problem is that gender-specific nouns, hell, gender-specific anything, can traumatise a non-binary person for life. Such a person’s reaction to binary nouns is unpredictable. He/she/it may just wince and keep going, or he/she/it may have a fit, complete with convulsions, frothing at the mouth and rolling on the floor.
But even if it’s only the former, something needs to be done to avoid offence. That’s why, if we have to use a gendered language, we must de-genderise it, as I’m sure you’ll agree.
Fine. We are all agreed in principle. But then comes that annoying ‘how’ question that can defeat many a worthy intention. If all major languages except English are gendered, how can we correct that problem? After all, we have no authority to tell those foreigners how to speak their own tongues, do we?
(The English Football League once punished a Uruguayan player for calling his Uruguayan friend negro, which in River Plate Spanish is an affectionate term free of racial connotations. Alas, such powers over foreign tongues can’t be exercised beyond our borders. Not yet anyway.)
The title above points to one solution, but I’m man enough to realise that idea is impractical. Foreigners tend to be stubborn creatures, and they’ll continue to eat at their feminine tables and sleep in their masculine beds. Nothing much we can do about that.
True? False, says our oldest university. There’s plenty to be done, and we can start with Latin, all of whose native speakers are too dead to object.
Since the 12th century, degrees at Oxford University have been conferred in Latin, and here an alarm bell must sound in your head. For Latin is a gendered language, meaning potentially offensive to non-binary students.
As founder and chairman of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity, I’m pleased to see that the administration of that august institution is alert to the potential for causing acute distress.
That’s why Oxford’s faculties have been told that it’s “necessary” to introduce the first gender-neutral ceremony in the university’s history. Not advisable, not desirable – necessary, sic. Well, they do say necessity is a mother.
It’s necessary, says the administration, to expurgate all gendered masculine and feminine nouns from the ceremonial text, especially the masculine ones because they can offend a broader group. Yet some such words, one might think, must be rather hard to dispense with.
For example, students receiving their master’s degrees are called magistri in Latin, which word is offensively masculine – as is the word doctores designating recipients of the higher degree. The problem seems insurmountable but, as Lenin said, there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks can’t capture. The same applies to the Bolsheviks’ descendants at our oldest university.
My suggestion is that, rather than castrating Latin, it should be abolished altogether, especially since this language is both dead and, well, elitist.
I’m proud that, for once, my idea is shared by our Labour government. It has cut the £4-million Latin Excellence Programme, citing elitism as the reason. Latin will no longer be taught in state schools, which is a good start. But let’s not stop there: there exist other elitist subjects begging for the chop.
Correct English grammar is one such, but then we needn’t bother about that: it hasn’t been taught at state schools for quite some time, if the way people speak is any indication. Although I imagine Oxford students are still encouraged to avoid solecisms, I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t.
After all, academic authorities have more important things to worry about. Our Russell Group institutions, comprising 27 best universities, are busily queering the pitch by, in their parlance, “queering the curricula” to make them kinder to non-binary students.
When I was younger, the word ‘queer’ was considered rude and derogatory but, as any illiterate person will tell you, languages develop. Thus, homosexual and transsexual activists have “reclaimed” the word and now use it as an “empowerment” term.
I’m glad they call it that because it emphasises that such bowdlerising is a weapon in a struggle for power. Alas, the struggle is quite one-sided, with sanity ceding its positions without a fight.
Thus the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS University of London), has instructed its staff to “embed trans, non-binary and intersex awareness into their curriculum” and invite guest lecturers who are “trans, non-binary or intersex”.
And a couple of years ago, York University’s English department held a seminar to “celebrate ways of queering the curriculum”, including studying “encounter LGBTQ+ writers from across history”. That initiative ought to be expanded to all Russell Group universities, with only such writers to be studied.
That would mean, among other wonderful things, eliminating such hopelessly binary subjects as theology. After all, it’s hard to avoid the lamentable fact that the New Testament was written in Greek, where the word Theos is masculine – which is logical since it stands for God the Father, not God the Non-Binary Parent.
The Old Testament is equally culpable, which Jesus proved by using the Aramaic word Abba when asking God to forgive his torturers. So there goes theology, and good riddance too. Such colonising subjects can get in the way of queering the curricula, and we can’t have that, can we?
It’s good to see that progress is proceeding apace. Our smithies of academically trained intellects are forging minds perfectly trained to demolish whatever little is left of our civilisation. And they are doing a sterling job.