I do not respect gendered languages. I will not apologize for misgendering a pencil. The right form of "the" for an apple is "the apple."
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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In French, it's 'le pénis,' but nobody says that. 'Dick,' is feminine (la bite.)
Also, 'vagina' is masculine, but 'pussy' is feminine, because if you were to say 'le chat' it would mean a cat, but by feminising the word, it becomes 'la chatte,' meaning pussy.
As someone who grew up Anglophone, I actually find gendered languages much more precise. On the other hand, in order to make yourself understood one must have a rich vocabulary, because the definitions of words are often more narrow than in English.
And don't even get me started on phrasal verbs... English is messy.
I actually find gendered languages much more precise.
Just never ask a group of Germans what the singular article of Nutella is.
I don't get the weirdness of phrasal verbs? It's a basic staple of every Indoeuropean language to generate verbs by tacking on prepositions. Ok, it's a bit weird to use prepositions after the word, but that's just standard Germanic separable verbs that are a bit regulized. So what?
They're just so ubiquitous in English. In my experience, people coming from the Romance languages have a very hard time with them, because most of the actions they describe are a single verb in their mother tongues. Imagine having to remember what two words mean, but then also having to remember that when you use the two words together, they form a distinct, sometimes even unrelated, meaning.
And there's thousands.
You'd better back down before this blows up or i break down
back up - actual phrase
break up - actual phrase
Why no blow down?
Pure poetry.
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One of my languages has three genders for living creatures, and two genders for items. Those genders are all different from each other: humans and other living beings are male/female/living neutral, things are item neutral/item neutral. An item neutral plural is also used for groups of living beings, but not for all groups of items.
One item neutral singular can in some instances be used for a living being regardless of their gender. The other item neutral would be insulting if used about living beings, and especially dehumanising to humans (wish someone had told me this sooner).
I have no idea when to use which item neutral. Locals keep correcting me or almost imperceptibly wincing when I get it wrong, so when I want to sound more fluent I just use the item plural for singulars as well - it seems less annoying for some reason.
Oh, and for one of the item neutrals, if you accidentally use the other item neutral it means the plural of the first one. Kill me now, lol.
Which godforsaken language is that?
Abyssal I assume.
So Luxembourgish?
Which language is that?
I've found that most of the time, just pick the most sexist answer you can think of, and you'll typically be right!
I really don't like gendered languages.
You'd love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.
There are some rules. Some of them are easy. One word ending is always feminine. I don't remember which tho. which is a shame :/
-ung is always feminin (among others like -keit) and mostly -e but the exceptions are enough that you can’t relax.
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You'll be right 50% of the times. Or 33% in german. And it doesn't match between languages. Like, "cat" is a she in german and a he in french. Often synonyms have different genders : une lettre/un courrier (both mean a mail).
I think the issue is that you are searching your mind for correlations between gender and sexism-related, which is often easier than searching for non-correlation. If I ask you "quick, think of a singer that wears leather", you'll find one instantly. But if I ask "quick, find a singer that doesn't wear leather" it takes a while, even though there more of them.
If you want a better impression of the phenomenon, open a dictionary, go over words one by one and count the points.
And also "organ" (the instrument) in french is male when singular and female when plural. "C'est un bel orgue" and "Ce sont de belles orgues".
- Dick (bite) = Feminine
- Cunt (con) = Masculine
My favorite example for people who think grammatical gender has more than a passing correlation to social gender.
That being said there is actual built-in sexism to grammatical gender in some areas, e.g. job titles (un chauffeur = a driver, une chauffeuse = a prostitute).
"penis" is masculine while "bite" is feminine, too
I would argue that "chauffeuse" for feminine drivers and "chauffeuse" for easy girls should be considered different words, homonyms, likely with separate etymologies. A feminine driver should be called a chauffeuse, and theorically an easy boy could be called a chauffeur. It will not happen because nobody uses the slur this way, but that's unrelated to the grammatical structure of the language. Wouldn't call it built-in.
Words meanings always slide around and we have markers in some of them that determine whether the word describes a man or a women. Since we treat women and men differently, it's not surprising that the feminine variant might end up with different connotations than the masculine one. But the words in question do not have gender, they inherit the gender of who they describe. It's a different thing, unrelated to the assignment of genders to objects
To be clear, I am not defending the idea that you should give gender to things, nor that you should change the suffix in all the words that refer to women. I think it's stupid and I wish we didn't even have pronouns in the first place
Well, that's because chauff-eur/euse means neither driver nor prostitute, but "heater", as in "someone who makes hot". One heats the steam engine, the other their clients. The sexism is not built in the language or the gender system, but in the patriarchal culture.
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I asked my Francophone buddy that grew up in backwoods Quebec how the hell he kept it all in his head. He said that he never bothered.
If it had an "e" on the end, he just assumed it was feminine.
If he was drunk, he didn't give a single flying tabernak.
There’s a pattern to it. I don’t know what it is, and I’m not sure anyone knows consciously. But for example, when creating new words (eg. fantasy/sci-fi context) there usually isn’t any confusion as to what that word’s gender will be, it just sounds bad with the wrong pronoun. There are a few exceptions of course, same as “autobus” and “avion” which technically have a gender assigned but people toss a coin every time.
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Mark Twain also struggled with language
To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female—tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and NOT according to the sex of the individual who wears it—for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.
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