May 16, 2021

FRANCE: France Has Banned Gender-Neutral Words From Being Used In Schools, Says They're "Harmful" To The French Language And Culture. Heck Yeah!

The Daily Mail, UK
written by Chris Pleasance
Tuesday May 11, 2021

France has banned schools from using 'gender neutral' spellings, saying they are a threat to the French language.

The country's education ministry issued the ruling last week after a push to include full stops in the middle of written words - dubbed 'midpoints' - which allow both male and female forms to be represented simultaneously.

But the Academie Francaise, which is responsible for guarding the French language, said the move is 'harmful to the practice and understanding of [French.]'

In French grammar, nouns take on the gender of the subject to which they refer, with male perferred over female in mixed settings.

Therefore, a group of friends with four women and one man is referred to using the masculine 'amis' - causing controversy among gender equality advocates

With midpoints included, the written world becomes 'ami.e.s', including the feminine 'e' ending - though it would still be pronounced the same when spoken.

Advocates say the midpoints make French 'more inclusive' but critics say it creates differences between written and spoke French which make the language harder to learn and threaten its entire existence.

Nathalie Elimas, the State Secretary for Priority Education, said the drive to make French 'gender neutral' will not increase it popularity, but will instead drive more people to learn English which does not gender its nouns.

'With the spread of inclusive writing, the English language - already quasi-hegemonic across the world - would certainly and perhaps forever defeat the French language,' she said as the ban was issued.

Jean-Michel Blanquer, France's education minister, told Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche the use of dots in the middle of words also 'present a barrier' for people with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia.

In response, the left-wing SUD - one of France's largest teaching unions - issued its own statement calling on teachers to ignore the ruling.

Blanquer should 'stop trying to impose his backwardness on the education community,' the statement said.

But the Academie's decree did include some concessions to equality campaigners, recommending that certain job titles should change forms when the person holding the role is female.

For example, a female president would be referred to as 'prรฉsidente'.

Job application forms should also include both male and female titles to encourage more women to apply, the decree added.

Research has claimed that women sometimes feel put off from applying for roles when only male forms are used on the application.
The Blaze
written by Paul Sacca
Saturday May 16, 2021

France has banned the use of gender-neutral language in schools, bucking the recent woke culture trend spreading throughout academia around the world.

Gender equality advocates were pushing for full stops in the middle of written words, which they called "midpoints," that would allow both male and female forms of the word to be represented at the same time. The Daily Mail reported, "In French grammar, nouns take on the gender of the subject to which they refer, with male preferred over female in mixed settings."

However, the Academie Francaise or the French Academy, which is the 400-year-old education authority responsible for preserving the French language, shot down the woke proposal. The Academie Francaise declared the overture to be "harmful to the practice and understanding of [French]."

Nathalie Elimas, France's state secretary for priority education, said the proposed gender-neutral changes were "a danger for our country" and "the death knell for the use of French in the world." Elimas added that the use of midpoints "dislocates words, breaks them into two."

Elimas said the changes would push people to learn English, which doesn't gender nouns, instead of French, "With the spread of inclusive writing, the English language—already quasi-hegemonic across the world—would certainly and perhaps forever defeat the French language."

France's education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that the midpoints would present challenges for learning disabilities, including dyslexia.

"In addition, this writing, which results in the fragmentation of words and agreements, constitutes an obstacle to reading and understanding the written word," Blanquer stated. "The impossibility of verbally transcribing texts using this type of writing hampers reading aloud as well as pronunciation, and consequently learning, especially for the youngest."

Despite the decision from the Academie Francaise, a French teacher's union, the SUD Education Union, attacked the ruling and even instructed schools to ignore it.

"SUD Education demands from the Minister that he stop trying to impose his backwardness on the educational community," the statement read. "SUD calls on staff to take no account of these instructions from another time, and to exercise as they wish, depending on professional situations, the full use of their pedagogical freedom."

Top French politicians, journalists, and intellectuals have recently become concerned about woke "out-of-control leftism and cancel culture'' from the United States and how it could affect French culture.

"Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture," the New York Times reported in February. "With its echoes of the American culture wars, the battle began inside French universities but is being played out increasingly in the media. Politicians have been weighing in more and more, especially following a turbulent year during which a series of events called into question tenets of French society."

French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech in October, where he sounded the alarm about "certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States."

"Many of these topics in which France used to excel academically have been undermined and we have abandoned them," Macron said in his speech. "And in so doing, we have left the intellectual debate to others, to those outside of the Republic by ideologizing it, sometimes yielding to other academic traditions…And when I see certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States, with their problems, which I respect and which exist, but which are just added to ours, I say to myself that it is reasonable to make this choice. And so we must, very clearly, re-invest, on a massive scale, in the field of social sciences, history, understanding of civilizations by creating posts, by stepping up dialogue, academic and scientific debate in order not to allow the knowledge, the understanding of Islam as a religion, of the civilization it underpins and its contribution to our country and our continent to become ideological and exclusively political debates."

In October, Blanquer warned that there is a need to fight the ideologies coming from American universities.

"No one has the right to cowardice anymore," Blanquer said, according to the Daily Wire. "There is a fight to be waged against an intellectual matrix coming from American universities and intersectional theses, which want to essentialize communities and identities, at the antipodes of our republican model which, for its part, postulates equality between human beings, independently of their characteristics of origin, sex, religion. It is the breeding ground for a fragmentation of our society and a vision of the world which converges with the interests of the Islamists."

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 7:09 PM

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