MARCH 28, 2023 — INA WEBER

Whether it is the subject of irritated tweets by politicians, lawsuits about corporate communication guidelines or lengthy discussions in talk shows: the practice of inserting a little asterisk into certain nouns remains a topic of debate in Germany. The asterisk, as in Bäcker*in for example, is intended to make the German language more gender-inclusive. In German – a language with three grammatical genders masculine, feminine and neuter – any nouns referring to people are usually used in the masculine form. The so-called generic masculinum is supposed to include not only males but also everyone else without explicitly mentioning them. 

The counterargument states that this practice makes women and non-binary people invisible and evokes mental pictures of men only. This is seen as particularly problematic when talking about high-status job titles, such as CEOs, judges, or engineers. It could suggest that these positions are not occupied by and out of reach for women and non-binary people. For these reasons, you can increasingly find words like Chef*in, Richter:in or Ingenieur_innen in German texts (colon and underscore are different writing styles with the same meaning as the asterisk). 

This is called gendern (gendering) and it polarises opinions and triggers heated – often moralised – discussions which can escalate into blatant hate speech and harassment (for example against journalists who have received death threats for using gender-inclusive language). Discussions of social change, especially when relating to an improvement of gender or racial equity, often exhibit high levels of incivility and toxicity. A change in the norms of language use, which affects not only society at large but also individuals in their personal way of expressing themselves, makes no exception to that. 

Following some of the discussions about gendering made me wonder whether these were isolated or repeating instances of toxicity. To find answers to this question, I used the EOOH Dashboard to gather German-language tweets, Facebook posts and Instagram posts about gendering. I started this search with variations of the commonly used derogatory term #gendergaga (gender craze). Based on the results I received, the list of keywords then quickly expanded with other negatively connotated terms like Genderideologie (gender ideology) or Sprachzwang (coerced speech).  

A first glance at the Dashboard output revealed nothing excessively problematic about how gendering is discussed. Most of the obtained content was not very toxic (76% of the tweets and posts had a toxicity score of lower than 0.2). Besides being mentioned in relation to politics, the topic appeared particularly often in a joking or ridiculing context, but seldom in relation to threats. However, by doing a qualitative content analysis and looking more closely at different themes in the content, another impression of the scale of toxicity became visible.

Understanding how toxicity can be communicated between the lines rather than through obviously offensive terms is generally important, not just when looking at the gendering debate. What people say on social media may not only reflect individual opinions but can also strategically create imageries around a topic and ultimately function as a door-opener for a stream of more extreme discriminatory and hateful content. The following examples give an insight into some of the narratives I identified and how they connect gendering to other topics of discussion.    

1 - The dangerous gender ideology

Some people see gendering or the “gender craze” as a manifestation of a so-called gender ideology. Posts collected on the Dashboard (see examples) state that the gender ideology indoctrinates people, contributes to the early sexualization of children and brainwashes them into being transgender. These claims and related calls to protect children and teenagers are a clear expression of homophobic and transphobic sentiments. They reflect populist positions of right-wing parties such as the AFD in Germany or the PIS party in Poland to prohibit sex education in schools that considers any kind of gender- and sexual diversity.

2 - The public propaganda broadcaster

The word indoctrination also appears frequently when people talk about the public broadcaster. Several posts describe the public broadcaster as a state-controlled instrument of re-education and mantra-like brainwashing by politically hyper-correct and moralising journalists (see examples). This narrative frames journalistic work as propaganda with the purpose of enforcing the gender craze on the population. In contrast to objective and valid criticism of the public broadcaster, such repeated defamation again feeds into popular narratives that right-wing actors use to sow doubt about the independence and impartiality of mainstream media news.

3 - Prosecution by the speech police 

Many pieces of content claim that people are coerced into gendering by the “speech police”. This narrative of coerced speech stokes up fear and outrage about elites ready to cancel everyone who does not fit into their woke worldview and evokes pictures of totalitarian conditions in Germany (see examples). Some instances go as far as mentioning gendering as related to the antisemitic conspiracy theory of the Great Reset. The coercion narrative can be found not only in relation to gendering, but also other progressive topics, for example climate protection (referred to as eco-dictatorship or climate terror by the state). 

These are just a few examples to show how toxic discourses about gendering are not incidental but parts of various recurring narratives that feed into a broader, anti-progressive backlash. According to polls, many people in Germany do not appreciate the use of gender-inclusive language. At the same time, the Duden (the main dictionary of Standard High German) has removed the generic masculinum from its roughly 12.000 entries of occupational titles. In short, the discussions are likely to continue. 

When following debates about gendering on social media, it is important to keep in mind that the potential of a controversial topic to polarise opinions can be employed strategically, for example by framing a new idea as a scapegoat for people’s fears and worries. Meanwhile, toxic narratives as the ones described here can contribute to shifting the limits of what can be said publicly and provide possibilities to mainstream more hateful ideologies and anti-democratic sentiments. Since the toxicity often hides between the lines, it is likely that many posts and tweets remain unmoderated and uncontested on social media. It is therefore all the more important to develop educational resources that help people to identify implicit toxicity, understand how it can be overlaid by moralised discourse and know how to counteract it.  

1. For example, see tweet by Nicole Diekmann: https://twitter.com/nicolediekmann/status/1559476908655616000 

2. The findings discussed here refer to data collected from August – December 2022 and were generated by a preliminary and exploratory content analysis. This is not an in-depth scientific examination of the content and does not claim to be generalizable of representative.

3. Antifeministische Behauptungen erkennen und widerlegen: https://gegen-antifeminismus.de/
   and Fabian Kellermann (11.02.2020): Kaum Aufklärung an polnischen Schulen. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sexualkundeunterricht-kaum-aufklaerung-an-polnischen-schulen-100.html

4. For example, the AFD has cultivated terms such as Lügenpresse (lying press) to discredit journalistic work (cf. Wilhelm Heitmeyer, Manuela Freiheit & Peter Sitzer: Rechte Bedrohungsallianzen. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020).

5. Ironically, as different posts in the dataset point out, the opponents of gendering seem to get much more worked up about the presence of gender-inclusive language, than its defenders when words are not gendered.

6. According to a poll by infratest dimap from 2021, 65% of adults eligible to vote in Germany are against gendering in the media and the public. https://www.infratest-dimap.de/umfragen-analysen/bundesweit/umfragen/aktuell/weiter-vorbehalte-gegen-gendergerechte-sprache/. It shall be noted that the poll appears to be connected to the newspaper Welt am Sonntag, which is known to have a rather conservative-right political stance. 

7. Duden gendert seit 2021 alle 12.000 Berufsbezeichnungen: https://www.ndr.de/kultur/Duden-gendert-seit-2021-alle-12000-Berufsbezeichnungen,duden132.html (Norddeutscher Rundfunk, 13.05.2022).

Translated Content:

1 - The dangerous gender ideology – examples 

„The only reason why there are so many trannies is because young people are getting brainwashed with all that gender craze! A whole generation gets corrupted because of the filthy left-green ideology!” (Note: filthy left-green = pejorative term to describe followers of left-wing and green political movements, often mentioned in relation to progressive topics)

(TL;DR): “Our children in day cares and schools are already confronted with the lunatic hypothesis that they could choose their gender. […] There is a danger that we are raising a disoriented and mentally stricken generation. At least a part of the young people will fall victim to this hostile and misanthropic ideology.”

2 - The public propaganda broadcaster

“The biggest danger for our country comes from the green-left infiltrated media landscape. Everyone there is getting blackmailed with professional and societal annihilation, whenever he or she is not in line. Something that everyone should contemplate about.”

“The citizens are increasingly seeing right through the propaganda TV with their woke mainstream dictatorship  gender craze brainwashing re-education program.”

3 - Prosecution by the speech police 

“Conservatives don’t do gendering. Whoever does gendering takes part in the left-ideological nonsense, but probably mostly only out of fear to be called a Nazi, fascist pig, intolerant, homophobic or misogynistic. That’s what it’s come to with the left-wing speech dictatorship.”  

“Whoever is left-green enough to think that Islamification (the new colorful world), climate terror, eco dictatorship, total digital control, one ‘pandemic’ after the other, syringe-terror culminating in trans-humanism, gender craze, Great Reset etc. are all amazing things will be better off. The rest won’t.”