"...the superstition of such Grammarians dreaming of the imperfect e,
that they call foeminin, as if Claude, Antoine, Pierre,
Pie, Helie, Hieremie, etc. were not men's names.
THE BARRAGOUYNE MISTORY OF FANFRELUCHE AND GAUDICHON.
ANONYMOUS, LYON, AT JEAN DIEPPI'S, 1574

Linguistic illumination of an ideological imposture

The claim to contribute to the social progress of inclusive writing (IE) is based on false premises, linked to a partial interpretation distorting the reality of the attested grammatical functioning of the French language. Inclusive writing is a militant reform of the language built on the denunciation of imaginary injustices deriving from symbolic interpretations that do not correspond to any strictly linguistic reality. It intends to inscribe various gender identities or to "make women visible", political marketing that has nothing in common with the description of the nominal classes of French and constitutes a political claim based on beliefs and not on empirically verified knowledge. Its supporters, even among linguists, prescribe works and references that go against the methods, data and knowledge accepted in language sciences.

This short article includes:

• a reminder of the linguistic issues concerning inclusive writing
• important quotes summarizing the errors and falsifications of inclusivism 
• a bibliography with links to consult certain articles online

The problems posed by inclusive writing

It is important to remember that the justifications commonly proposed to defend inclusive writing are ideological in nature and contravene the basic principles of linguistic analysis. The question of noun classes is notably presented in a simplistic, realistic and misleading manner without distinguishing between "morphological gender" and "semantic gender", a confusion concerning fundamental and well-described phenomena. Here is a brief reminder of the arguments put forward by the defenders of inclusive writing. These brief elements must be supplemented by reading the sources presented in the bibliography where these themes are developed, argued and augmented with data and demonstrations.

1. Inclusivism is based on a misinterpretation: male et female applied to linguistic signs do not mean male et female. These are word classes, not sexual categories. Language does not work according to a correspondence between reality and words: saying "everyone came" uses the singular, whereas world refers to a plurality of people: sex has no part in it. The gender of words is not in a systematic relationship with sex (this guy is a loser ; Sarah is a famous model ; a supplier does not designate a man or a woman, but a company, etc.). The complexity of the configurations of meaning cannot be reduced to sexual designation alone. We cannot therefore draw social conclusions from it that would justify a linguistic policy.
2. Gender in French is complex and also includes neutral functions. (quoi is opposed to here ; do so is opposed to that and celle). For humans, the so-called "masculine" form most often functions as a neutral or impersonal and does not have a sexual designative value (it is raining ; they will raise taxes ; The person liable refers to the person who pays the tax to the Public Treasury; kids shout all the time). We cannot put statements like "I don't care if the translator is a female translator" in the feminine or in inclusive writing: we need the morphological "masculine" to express the semantic neutral.
3. Statements like "Language is sexist" cannot make sense for linguistics: language was not invented by anyone and is not the result of intentionality. Like all languages, French allows you to express an opinion and its opposite: you can hold sexist or egalitarian discourses with the same tools. Language does not think for individuals. Linguistic determinism is a doctrine that has long been considered invalid by the language sciences. It is an outdated belief that has its place with judgments about the psychology of peoples ("backward language" = "backward people", for example).
4. The demand to “make women visible” is a metaphor that has no meaning for grammar: language does not "make visible" anything at all and does not constitute an instrument for promoting identity. Language is a communication and cognitive tool that does not fall under quantitative logic or social representation. In this regard, the claim of the Inclusive Writing Manual ("Advance gender equality through your writing") is charlatanism and not a proven relationship between language and social organization. Language evolves in its forms, just as society evolves in its organization, but There is no causal link between language forms and social hierarchy.
5. EI introduces unprecedented learning challenges. Apart from the feminization of job titles, which pre-existed inclusivism and which no one disputes, none of the inclusivist prescriptions have a linguistic basis. On the contrary, their application creates units that do not belong to the language and spellings foreign to the orthographic system. This gives rise to difficulties in writing, reading and pronunciation that affect everyone (even activists), and excludes dyslexics, dysphasics and dyspraxics. No practitioner of inclusive writing applies it consistently and continuously, even its inventors: this is an indication that it is inapplicable, and it is generally reduced to random displays. Language reforms have always aimed to simplify it and not make it more complex. IE therefore creates difficulties for many audiences.
6. Even in relation to his stated project which would like to "improve equality" through writing - without specifying the criteria of social reality - EI contravenes the empirical reality of language which is not only manifested by administrative writing but also by oral practice. The genre, the morphosyntax, the agreements as they agree belong to a system other than the one visible in writing. Inclusivism does not propose any coherent theory to account for this.
7. Inclusive writing is a political marketing operation which followed its registration as a domain name in 2016 and the development of the activity of a "communication and influence agency" (Les Mots Clés) which sells consulting and training. It does not emanate from spontaneous uses, nor from democratic representation, but from the activist and commercial sector.
8. ISIS spreads linguistic separatism. Different identity groups (LGBTQIA+) also want to mark their identity with distinct signs such as the creation of neutral forms (iel for il/elle ; th for le/la). The claimed multiplication of so-called grammars queer leads to a deregulation of uses. This causes an atomization of the language into as many communities, into a form of linguistic, graphic and ideological separatism.
9. A historical falsification : ISIS supporters distort historical and linguistic facts to make them compatible with a victim interpretation of the female condition. Among the thousands of phenomena that constitute a language, ISIS supporters have found only the outdated formulation "the masculine prevails over the feminine" relevant, considered by specialists in the history of educational practices as "a rule unknown in textbooks"¹.
10. Inclusive writing is a dialect, that is, a type of expression practiced by a minority. As an ideological and graphic practice, EI is practiced in place of standard French by many administrations: it is a reform de facto which has not been accepted by any elected body.
11. ISIS establishes potential discrimination between those who practice it and the others. Let us emphasize that this works both ways, depending on political sympathies. Potentially, a text in inclusive writing can be the object of discrimination in the context of funding, recruitment, a request, etc. if it is read by someone who does not practice it. And vice versa, of course. As a partisan graphic practice, it manifests an ideological and militant preference, therefore a breach of neutrality.
12. By establishing a vague standard, but one emanating from authorities such as universities or certain administrations, the EI imposes an ambiguous signal on users: are they supposed to comply with this standard or not? This results in ambiguities that undermine the transparency of certain practices, which are potentially discriminatory. : the EI can become a sign of recognition for a recruiter or a jury, which can circumvent the anonymity of a document (such as exam copies).
13. ISIS is a political and ideological constraint. EI, whose operation has only been vaguely formalized by a communications agency, does not constitute a regulated practice: it provokes a feeling of linguistic insecurity among the citizens who are subjected to it. EI is a practice that differentiates between citizens on the basis of a social and moral judgment. Contrary to the arbitrariness of linguistic and graphic conventions, EI is based on the definition of a moral orthodoxy.
14. ISIS Violates Prime Minister Edouard Philippe's Circular² and places administrative staff in a delicate position vis-à-vis superiors who decided on this practice, which constitutes a language reform that was not pronounced by the competent authorities.
15. ISIS was imposed by militant practice relevant to bullying³ and cannot be accepted by the State which would thus recognise the pressure being put on it.
16. ISIS poses the problem of teaching standards : if the French language is no longer based on a grammatical and orthographic consensus, then what should members of the National Education system teach? How should exam and competition papers be assessed? How can the State assess and certify teaching models?

Accepting the practice of IS opens the door to the destruction of the common language: each ideological movement being able to claim to inscribe its choices and political-identity markings in the language, this would amount to accepting that activists can impose the language reforms that suit them (for example at the level of an establishment, a city, a region, etc.).

Accepting IS means considering the end of all consensual teaching, the emergence of infinite demands (inscribing sexual non-binarity in the language, the refusal to practice French in favor of foreign languages, etc.). 

Accepting the differentialist political marking of the EI means ultimately propagating the decomposition of the social body, administrations and institutions.

Some quotes…

These quotes summarize the conclusions of certain articles and works concerning the arguments of the defenders of inclusive writing. Whether in the field of the history of language or the historiography of grammarians, Eliane Viennot's theses are severely reframed in terms of their method by Piron and Grinshpun. In terms of the principles of general linguistics, the quotes from Grinshpun, Rastier and Szlamowicz highlight the partiality of symbolic reasoning and the theoretical shortcomings in the evocation of language questions among the inclusivists whose linguistic descriptions are always allusive and faulty.

• Sophie Piron:

"It appears that the thesis of masculinization [of Eliane Viennot], in her arguments of e feminine and job titles, suffers from major flaws: poor data collection, poor exploitation and interpretation of the data, and this, due to a lack of knowledge of the intellectual, grammatical and linguistic context of the time. Finally, the forces of evolution that operate in historical linguistics are also totally absent from the argument deployed, in favor of a conspiratorial discourse on the evolution of language, a discourse that is part of a Manichean vision of the world, opposing dominant men and dominated women. This is precisely the impressive power of the thesis put forward.

In “The polemical masculine: historical counter-argument on the profession”, CirCula, number 15, Les Éditions de l'Université de Shebrooke, 2022, pp. 199-228

• Yana Grinshpun:

"The linguistic analysis of the assertions found in Viennot's works is unequivocal: in addition to the confusions and the puerility of the demonstrations, we note ideological claims based on historical approximations, false correlations between grammar and social structure or between versification and anatomy, a personal feeling presented as a common experience, unverified assertions that are not based on corpora and that are refuted by research, unacceptable anachronisms, grammatical and historical misinterpretations. All this testifies to a prescientific spirit that disregards linguistic epistemology, which ignores the functioning of the system by proposing false, contradictory or partial explanations."

In "Has the 'masculinization' of French taken place?", in Grammatical gender in French and inclusive writing, Observables n°1, 2021

Yana Grinshpun and Jean Szlamowicz:

"The introduction of ideological reasoning into the prescription linguistics is nothing new. On the other hand, it is quite unprecedented that, in a framework intended to be scientific, the Description linguistic interpretation is done through the prism of a moral reading. The disapproval of "the norm" is thus based on the ideological prejudice of a deconstruction always arbitrarily proposed as necessary, confusing in particular certain axiological presuppositions of the word standards as a social constraint with its descriptive value designating grammaticality. We have thus heard certain academics raise the question of the "legitimacy" of the masculine to be generic. Not only is this a question that does not concern linguistic description, but which introduces its moralization, with a prescriptive social intervention as a correlate. To think that the question of a "legitimacy" of linguistic forms arises is to imagine that grammar represents ideological positions: this is a belief. Because language as it is embodied in the diversity of languages ​​is a cognitive and communicational tool unrelated to a conditioning of thought. The diversity of opinions expressed in each language is elementary proof of this.
Intellectually, this amounts to believing in metalanguage, fetishizing it, and falling into the trap of labeling, hypostatizing the concept by believing that it "is" reality. That there are unmarked forms in French is a morphosyntactic fact: it has nothing to do with the name we gave them. That we called these forms masculine does not, moreover, fall under a "legitimacy": what established the masculine/feminine terminology is not a differentiation at the level of "superiority" but of the simple morphemic analogy noting the difference between man/woman and applying it to the difference between genders of words (which serve, among many other things, to designate the difference between man/woman).
Why be scandalized that what is called male either generalizing and the female specifying? This is to project an arbitrary symbolism that could be perfectly reversed: how would it be more socially "valorizing" to be generic than specific? No one has ever defined themselves by a grammatical identity, which has never conferred material privileges. It is therefore an injustice devoid of observable fact. Moreover, one can imagine that, for the militant spirit determined to uncover the inequities that legitimize its approach, it would also be necessary to be scandalized if the feminine were generic and if the masculine had the "chance" to distinguish itself by its specific nature. Deciding, "symbolically", on an axiology of terminology is not a reasoning on linguistic factuality, but a projection on a naive interpretation of the language."

In “Introduction” to Grammatical gender in French and inclusive writing, observables No. 1, 2021

• François Rastier:

"Let us recall that grammatical categories, such as gender, number, aspect, etc., allow determination in discourse, by agreements or concordances, and have no impact on representations of the world, which are moreover multiple in discourses relating to the same language. Persian does not have a gender category and women are nonetheless discriminated against in Iran. Out of a sample of approximately 250 languages, fewer than 90 could demonstrate a correlation between the gender of certain words and the probable sex of their supposed referents. What to do with inanimate objects? What to do with mice and turtles (male, but without gender)? Sentinels and French guards, often very virile? A coincidence would have it that gender was translated into French as genre, and gender ideology did the rest: after having been "fascist", according to Barthes who did not for all that shut himself away in a left-wing silence, French would be "macho" as media linguists like Bernard Cerquiglini have complacently claimed. Let us recall that a language can articulate the most contradictory ideologies and only ultra-nationalist ideologies have been able to claim that they were in themselves bearers of a determined or even determining vision of the world..."

In “Inclusive writing and exclusion of culture”, cities, full. 82, no. 2, 2020, pp. 137-148.

And even:

"Let us recall that founding distinctions for linguistics seem to have been completely ignored by the reformers: between the linguistic sign and the signal; between language and writing17 ; between the morpheme and the string of characters; between a language and a code; between meaning and reference; finally between description and imposition of standards. The theorists of inclusive writing in French are also specialists in literature and stylistics: authors of theses on Marguerite de Navarre, Balzac, Sarraute, etc., they develop an evocative vision of language, without dwelling too much on its actual functioning.

In “Inclusive writing and linguistic separatism”, August 10, 2020, Mezetulle

• Jean Szlamowicz:

"There are linguistic phenomena and social phenomena. When we postulate a causal relationship making language responsible for a state of society, we should at least not be mistaken about what language is, what society is and the relationship between the two. Three dimensions that are not described at all by these virtuous reformists except in a very vague manner. Should we recall that the signs of language are not humans? And that the fate of humans does not depend on the signs that sometimes designate them?"

in Sex and language, Intervals, 2018

And even:

"Inclusivism thus rejects, as a matter of principle, semiological chance, the continuum between formalism, semantics, diachrony and discursivity, assimilates the organization of societies to the form that their grammars take and prefers to find a radical realist motivation for the organization of gender in language whose foundation would be not only political but systematically oppressive. Such reasoning is not based on the observation of language data but on an ideological bias. Here again, why would this principle of a political foundation of semiology only work for gender? Inclusivism is thus resistant to methodological reflection: it is nevertheless a considerable epistemological difficulty to give a social meaning to morphosyntax. It is therefore a doctrine which, rejecting the history of the sciences of language, claims to decide its own rules and declare its symbolic interpretations sovereign." […]
The fact remains that inclusivists claim to make the world a better place by reforming grammar, which is, in itself, a rather audacious proposition. To make it acceptable, we must first imagine that language contributes to our societal misfortunes. The claim to decree the new inclusivist norms as "egalitarian language" therefore assumes that language would otherwise be "inegalitarian": there would thus be a morality of grammar. This proposition is radically questionable since it assumes, here again, a sort of unconscious of language that would apply to all speakers and influence their thinking. In terms of the individual practice of thought as a cognitive as well as intellectual production, I never cease to recall the beautiful formula of Émile Benveniste: "The possibility of thought is linked to the faculty of language, because language is a structure informed by meaning, and to think is to handle the signs of language."15 Language does not think for us and it certainly does not contain the social order, neither egalitarian nor inegalitarian, in which speakers move - one can be as much Jewish as anti-Semitic in French. It will therefore necessarily be found doubtful to base a research program on a moralizing principle."

In “Inclusivism is fundamentalism”, Text! Volume XXV – n°1-2 (2020)

References

Summary works

• Charaudeau Patrick (2021), Language is not sexist. From an intelligence of the discourse of feminization, Lormont, The water's edge.
• Magniont, Gilles (2020), French Civil War Over Gender, Limoges, We'll see.
• Szlamowicz Jean (2018), Sex and language, Paris, Intervalles, followed by “Archaeology and etymology of gender”, Xavier-Laurent Salvador.

Collective works

• Grammatical gender and inclusive writing in French, dir. Grinshpun & Szlamowicz, observables No. 1, June 2021, freely accessible on Obusalf
• Language crises, dir. Szlamowicz and Grinshpun, 2022, Hermann
• The feminine and the masculine in language: inclusive writing in question, Danièle Manesse and Gilles Siouffi ed., Paris, ESF Sciences humaines, 2019, 208 p.

Linguistics articles

• Grinshpun Yana “Inclusive writing, the theory of the “masculinization” of French and intellectual imposture”, 2021 Text and feeling n ° 23
• Neveu, Franck (2021), “Language, law, order”, Cités, n° 86 (Language under control, under the direction of Isabelle Barbéris and Franck Neveu), p. 13-29.
• Piron Sophie, “The polemical masculine: historical counter-argument on the profession”, CirCula, number 15, Les Éditions de l'Université de Shebrooke, 2022, pp. 199-228
• Rastier François, “Inclusive writing and exclusion of culture”, cities, full. 82, no. 2, 2020, pp. 137-148. Online
• Rastier François, “Inclusive writing and linguistic separatism”, August 10, 2020, Online
• Szlamowicz Jean, “Inclusivism is a fundamentalism”, [Online], Text! Volume XXV – n°1-2 (2020). Coordinated by Créola Baltaretu Thénault

Tribune

• Grinshpun, Yana, Franck Neveu, François Rastier and Jean Szlamowicz (2020), “An “exclusive writing” which “imposes itself through propaganda”: ​​32 linguists list the flaws of inclusive writing”, Marianne, September 18.

Various sources

• File maintained by Catherine Kintzler on Mezetulle
• Catherine Kintzler, " Inclusive writing for the hard of hearing, October 9, 2017, Mezetulle
• Sabine Prokhoris, “The trompe-l’oeil of inclusive writing”, LibérationDecember 14 2017
• Sami Biasoni (ed.), Discomfort in the French language, Editions du Cerf, 2022