An old joke depicts an English tourist seated on a terrace in Paris. He calls out to the waiter: “Boy! he says, there’s a fly in my soup. The boy takes a quick look, then, imperturbable, replies: “Sir, it’s not a fly, but a fly.” “Oh,” retorts the dumbfounded tourist, “you have good eyes!” »
The comedy of this little joke is obviously based on the error of the non-French speaker who wrongly interprets the opposition of grammatical gender as a sexual opposition; while any French-speaker knows, of course, that the word “fly” is feminine, regardless of whether the flies in question are male or female.
I have just written: “every French speaker knows of course” that the grammatical gender of words is not linked to the sex of what they designate. But is this still the case? We can ask ourselves this when we read all kinds of remarks, linked to what has recently been called “inclusive writing”, which stem from the idea that a masculine word, therefore of masculine grammatical gender, could not designate female subjects (subjects?), and, I suppose, vice versa (but this is not clear, as evidenced by the popularity of the word “person”, to designate both women and men) .
If the word “Quebecois” does not refer to women in Quebec, does it refer more to individuals who say they are non-binary?
A reader of Duty thus protested, some time ago, that Minister Girard, during his presentation of the budget, “addressed Quebecers directly 31 times, and not once to Quebec women”. She saw it as a step back from the policy of “feminization of titles” in which Quebec is at the forefront.
But they are actually two completely different things. Feminizing the names of professions or titles constitutes a very natural lexical adaptation to the entry of women into professions from which they were previously absent; to suppress the neutral or general character of certain turns of phrase is quite another thing. Besides, who really thinks that, in the sentence “Les Québécois form a minority people within Canada”, the word “Québécois” does not include the inhabitants of Quebec?
The generic masculine
What is disturbing about this generic, or neuter, masculine and the rule of agreement associated with it is that some people apparently confuse grammatical gender with sexual identity. These same people will then hold as scandalous the rule of grammar which wants, as we keep repeating in the discourse on inclusive writing, that “the masculine prevails over the feminine” (even if it is not in the way that grammars present it), and see it as a denial of equality between women and men.
However, if the masculine plays the role of neuter or generic in French, it is not linked as some would like to believe to a sexism which would be consubstantial with it, or which would have been imposed on this language by grammarians and academicians. misogynists during the XVIIe century.
On this subject, let’s give the floor to a linguist from the University of Montreal, Sophie Piron, a specialist in French grammar and its history: “In the gender system in French, which does not recognize a neuter, it is the masculine who occupies this unmarked position. This is why the masculine (not to be understood in the sense of male) appears in contexts of neutralization: ce, ça, il (impersonal subject), le (repeated pronoun for a subordinate clause), mixed plural or generic plural (les travellers) and generic singular (everyone/one/the traveler). »
To think otherwise, and to see in a rule of grammar a discrimination against women, amounts to tackling on the language system considerations (political, legal) that are foreign to it.
Express generality
To refuse this generic masculine and to demand that the noun “Québécois” be accompanied at each of its occurrences by the feminine “Québécoises” is also to make sexual difference an absolute and unsurpassable difference and to want to impose it on language. We could no longer, in the same word, speak of women and men, hence the systematic recourse to the median point (the “Quebecois es”), in which the general would dissolve, that is to say the indifference to gender difference when its manifestation is irrelevant.
One can then wonder if, beyond the idea of inclusion which is always put forward, it is not rather a question of a refusal of generality itself in the name of a cult of the individual identity, the latter wanting to be irreducible to any more general identity whatsoever. The very principle of any language that reduces the diversity of the real to a necessarily reduced number of concepts would then be targeted.
But why then stop on such a good path? If the word “Quebecois” does not refer to women in Quebec, does it refer more to individuals who say they are non-binary? And then, why make sex the only identity determinant that the concept should explicitly encompass? When we say “Quebecers” (or “students”, or “employees”, etc.), are we specifying sufficiently that some of the people referred to by this generic term are French-speaking and others English-speaking, that some are black and other indigenous, etc. ?
At this point, the only remedy for this dissolution of concepts in the name of respect for diversity would probably be to replace all these terms once perceived as general by acronyms or lists of initials: QHFNBFANAPDC+?
Understand who can. The generic masculine finally has many advantages.