Patrick Moreau is a professor of literature in Montreal, contributor to the journal Argument, and essayist. He has notably published Cthe words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
In a text published Monday on the “Ideas” page, Antonin Rossier-Bisaillon claims to prove the need for inclusive writing because the use of the generic masculine would lead to what he calls a “masculine bias in our brain”. that is, a tendency to confuse generic masculine (“les Québécois” designating both women and men of Quebec) and specific masculine (“les Québécois” designating only male residents of Quebec). This desire to get out of militant injunctions by presenting a reasoned defense of inclusive writing is in itself interesting. However, the examples he presents in support of his thesis are not really convincing, any more than the research on which he bases his reasoning.
Thus, in the first example he gives, it is a question of determining whether the second of the two quoted sentences can appear as a continuation of the first: “The musicians walked in the station. As the weather was forecast to be fine, several women had no jackets. In this example, we must first recognize that the two sentences are not syntactically linked (nor would they be if we replaced “women” with “men”). In both cases, the reader must fill in missing information, since the two sentences constitute a sort of asyndeton or paratax, which is not a usual situation; in its normal use, discourse does everything to avoid this kind of ambiguity. For these sentences to be syntactically linked, it would suffice to specify “several women (or “men”) of the orchestra”.
If, in this second case (with “men”), the two sentences appear linked to a larger number of guinea pigs, it is perhaps not so much, furthermore, because of the use of the generic masculine as because of the word “jacket”, a traditionally masculine clothing attribute traditionally worn by musicians in classical orchestras (women musicians generally wear dresses). This hypothesis may be false, but it would at least deserve to be tested before concluding that there is a “bias” in our brain.
This is also the problem with this kind of research (and researchers) who, instead of observing the real functioning of the language, develop experiments whose sole purpose is to validate their initial hypothesis (the examples being obviously chosen according to this objective). In no case do they seek alternative explanations.
Thus, the conclusion that Antonin Rossier-Bisaillon draws from the interpretation of this example which would show “that our brain tends to choose the specific meaning more often than the generic meaning when it encounters a noun in the masculine” turns out to be questionable, if not false. . To realize this, it suffices to invoke other examples, which show on the contrary that this alleged preference of our brain has little to do with the gender of the words, but rather relates to the context. For example, if we submit the following sentence to readers: “The Canadians won gold in synchronized swimming”, it’s a safe bet that their brain will imagine, despite the generic masculine, swimmers rather than male swimmers. In other words, it is not so much the masculine or the use of epicene forms that leads us to imagine women or men as our experience of reality. It is therefore false to affirm that “by reading a noun in the plural masculine, our brain tends to imagine a group of men”. If we read “The models paraded on the catwalk”, our brain will certainly imagine women, whereas when faced with the syntagm “the stars of the small screen”, it will see both women and men.
In short, if we sincerely want to work for equality between women and men, it is not the language that needs to be changed, but the reality. If, tomorrow, there are as many women as men working in the IT field, our brains will get used to considering that the generic masculine “IT specialist” can designate both women and men. There is therefore no reason to question the generic value, in French, of the unmarked masculine, because it corresponds to all those situations where it is not useful to specify the sex of the persons in question. If we speak of “orchestral musicians” in this way rather than of “male and female musicians”, it is quite simply because the mention of sex (therefore the distinction between the masculine gender and the feminine gender) has not any relevance. It is not on the basis of their sex that we choose the said musicians, who form a whole and are selected “blindly” on the sole faith of their musical talent.
By systematizing the use of double inflection, including when such a specification is neither relevant nor therefore necessary, so-called inclusive writing does not work for equality between women and men, but for an identity politics that denies the universal and humanism, in other words, that there is, beyond the sexual difference, a common humanity of women and men. It also produces a self-fulfilling prediction, by inducing a “sexist identity bias”, which accustoms our brains to thinking absurdly that the gender of words always refers to sex and that we should therefore write the “mannequine” when it comes to a woman and the “star(te)” if it is a question of a man.