Not only authors have a hard time being accepted on the book market, but also publishers. Professionalism is the magic word and therefore we have had our books corrected by a professional editor (academic editor). He advocated gendering in terms of book market acceptability and we adopted the form for fear of being rejected by the book trade. Also, the apparent “short cuts” seemed more convenient at first, without suspecting what ideological dimensions the whole thing was to have. Well, it can no longer be changed for the trilogy by Alessandro de Poloni, but for this website and future works we will refrain from gender-specific differentiation for better understanding and lean on the recommendation of the German spelling advice  . In the spirit of equal treatment, corresponding terms will apply to all genders in the future, as previously provided for in the German spelling rules.

PS: In the land of poets and thinkers, it was mostly publishers and editors who cultivated and protected the German language heritage. It should continue to be so in order to counteract the mutilation of the mother tongue.

This text on gendering the German language is currently making its way through social media and gets to the heart of the dilemma. Quote from a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

“In the German language there is a natural gender (Sexus) and a grammatical gender (Genus). Feminist linguists like to confuse the two, if not to say they are wildly confused. Linguistic laypeople can easily spot the difference if their perspective is not ideologically clouded.

First, there are three gender forms (masculine, feminine, neuter), but only two biological sexes (male and female). Second, gender is also used for objects without any discernible parallel to natural gender: the hearth, the street, or the book. The fact that the breast is masculine, the glans is feminine and the penis is neuter is obviously not based on any biological background. The situation is similar, e.g. B. with the reader or the customer. While gender is used transgenderly (the guest, the human being, the person, the orphan, the child, the individual), sex represents a further division into male and female.

We are dealing here with what is called “synonymy” in linguistics. Synonyms are words that sound the same but mean different things. For example, a “grand piano” can be part of a bird, part of a soccer team, or a piano. Sometimes these synonyms are not so easy to tell apart, and then misunderstandings arise, as in feminist linguistics. “Customers” can also mean two things: “People who shop” as well as “men who shop”. By claiming that “customers” only refers to men, language critics create the impression that women are being linguistically oppressed. They are not guided by what people mean when they say something, but by what they impute to them, what they mean: “You’re only talking about men! You’re letting us women fall by the wayside again!” But that’s as annoying as it is wrong. Also, the singular article with the grammatical gender provides the difference between the (glad) customer and the customer, and the leader and the leader…

For the reasons just explained, 99 female teachers and one female teacher make a total of 100 teachers: the grammatical generic term is used as soon as there is even a mixed group. Without such a generic term, which applies to both genders, certain facts would not be formulated at all (e.g. “Every third entrepreneur in Austria is a woman.” or “We don’t even know the suspect’s gender.”) A “day” with its 24 hours consists of day and night, just like “the customer” can be male or female – regardless of his grammatical gender. The situation is similar with “the cat”: the feminine form is a generic term for both the female animal and the male animal, which we, if we want to specify more precisely, refer to as “the cat” (like “the customer” when female becomes “the customer”). Claiming that “the customer” only refers to men simply because “der” precedes it is grammatically about as well thought out as the argument that “the customer” obviously only refers to women because “the” precedes it. In truth, of course, neither article expresses sex: “die” refers to the plural form, “der” to gender. Only through the consistent double naming in the feminist language “the customers” is sexism introduced into the language, where it was not present before through the gender-independent generic term. is grammatically about as well thought out as the argument that “the customers” obviously only means women because “the” comes before it. In truth, of course, neither article expresses sex: “die” refers to the plural form, “der” to gender. Only through the consistent double naming in the feminist language “the customers” is sexism introduced into the language, where it was not present before through the gender-independent generic term. is grammatically about as well thought out as the argument that “the customers” obviously only means women because “the” comes before it. In truth, of course, neither article expresses sex: “die” refers to the plural form, “der” to gender. Only through the consistent double naming in the feminist language “the customers” is sexism introduced into the language, where it was not present before through the gender-independent generic term.

Incidentally, I often “stand in” for a colleague. Is no problem for me. But I also know the difference between gender and sex. And to be honest, I don’t really want to be a salesman, a door-to-door salesman… But a man who treats all women with respect as equals and hopes that there will soon be no more wage/salary differences between the sexes. Because that’s the only way we support emancipation – but not with a complicated gender-speaking-and-writing style.”