Gender: When did it become so complicated?

« Deux cents femmes et un cochon sont ARRIVÉS sur le pont, e accent aigu et s parce que dans la langue française le masculin l’emporte sur le féminin… » Monique Proulx (CE QU’IL RESTE DE MOI)

When did gender become a language issue? Perhaps only when those who were tired of being hemmed in or discounted shouted: Enough! But the conversation continues. More recently the question of gender has gone far beyond the male-female dichotomy, and perhaps this new power force representing the gender spectrum will have a greater impact on languages in the long-run. But for the time being, as it does in almost all other aspects of social life, gender inequality between the masculine and feminine persists in many languages. In this respect, however, I cannot make a case for languages other than English and French. 

The tongue and the pen

Spoken language is always evolving. Written language, by its very nature, is much more conservative. While the language we speak gets tweaked by each passing generation, augmented by terminology stemming from new technologies and creative thinkers, and enriched with words and phrases from other languages, the extent to which a given written language is adaptive is very telling of the values and attitudes of its caretakers. English is fairly plastic, and the difference between its standard spoken and written forms is much less discernible than between the two forms in French.