Memes

The very same happens in French. The use of recently popular gender-neutral structures like "étudiant.e.s" is strongly discouraged in formal writing. The older "étudiant(e)s" less so but still not recommended.

What's recommended is to either say "étudiants et étudiantes" or just use the masculine form as a group for both masculine and feminine forms, as has been the standard forever, and almost no one bats an eye at.

It's not TERF, it's not misogynistic, it's just to make texts easier to read. It takes more time and effort to read a text full of those extra period/parenthesis characters, for very very little gain.

People wanting to write a text where they consider the sacrifice in readability worth it for the extra emphasis on gender inclusion still can; the police won't show up. It's just not standard grammar.

Saxony and Hesse are currently deep in the far right clutches of the Alternative für Deutaschland, so this does not really come as a surprise.

I have no opinion mostly bc I didn't read the whole thing) but I think its funny how "over 100 writers and scholars" isnt the impact it used to be. U can get 100 ppl to sign just about anything, especially in today's day and age when it's so easy for ppl to find other ppl with the same exact prejudices

Let's be honest: it looks like shit and interrupts the flow of a sentence. The alternative of writing both words completely also makes sentences way longer than they should be.

Every gendered language would have to make massive changes to become ungendered and change their grammar too. There's quite a large list of ungendered languages.

German, to my knowledge, is like Russian and has cases which change the ending of a noun depending on the purpose in the sentence (subject, direct object, indirect object, possessor, location, time, ...). Languages with only male and female would have to add a neutral ending, and languages with 3 grammatical genders would have to either use the neutral ending - if there is one, or make a new one specific to living beings.

Then of course pronouns would have to be changed too. In English they/them is already confusing enough when talking about a singular person to somebody and the person doesn't know it's a single person e.g "I talked to them today" - a group or a person? Until hints are dropped it isn't clear. The most logical would've been "it", but that's used for inanimate objects. I'm sure there's a neutral third person singular pronoun languages could borrow instead of using the second person plural.

Yeah Saxony and Bavaria are pretty much in the hand of populistic politicians and or outright right extremists.

@whydudothatdrcrane No, gender neutral pronouns are not banned. What is banned is the Binnen-I (Mitarbeiter*innen). It is recommended to use much easier to read Mitarbeiter und Mitarbeiterinnen or Mitarbeitende. Also the belittled version Mitarbeiterchen is gender neutral and allowed.