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"Gender language must be possible"

Hamburg's Equal Opportunities Senator Katharina Fegebank rejects a general ban on gender language in administration and authorities.

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"Gender language must be possible"

Hamburg's Equal Opportunities Senator Katharina Fegebank rejects a general ban on gender language in administration and authorities. You don't want to "make any rules about how someone should speak or write," said the Green politician. In Hamburg, gender language is not prescribed either in administration, at school or at the university. "But it must be possible to use them," she emphasized.

The background is an announced popular initiative “End gender language in administration and education”. It is currently being examined by the state returning officer and should start as early as February. It demands that the Hamburg administration must adhere to the recommendation of the Council for German Spelling in written and electronic communication and publications.

Among other things, the Council spoke out against the use of gender asterisks, underscores or colons to indicate gender neutrality, but at the same time warned "that all people should be met with gender-neutral language and that they should be addressed sensitively".

It is important to the Hamburg Senate that everyone feels addressed and represented by the administrative language, according to the Equal Opportunities Authority, which published its own “Notes on gender-sensitive language in the Hamburg administration” last summer. Among other things, the use of the colon was recommended.

"Our guidance on gender-sensitive language makes specific suggestions for those who want to use it," Fegebank said. "It is clear that where texts are incomprehensible or word monsters arise, the asterisk or colon must be used with common sense."

The state returning officer of the Hanseatic city is currently examining the admissibility of the popular initiative "End gender language in administration and education". The head of the movement is the art and psychotherapist Sabine Mertens, who is also a board member of the German Language Association. According to its own statements, the people's initiative is fighting against the "mutilation of the language".

"We want to let the citizens speak because the Hamburg administration has been changing us from the top down for years," says Mertens. Terms like “citizens” are “propaganda language of a radically queer feminist world view”. Furthermore, comprehensibility is lost through gendering. Mertens and her colleagues believe that an overwhelming majority opposes gender.

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