The Movement to De-Gender Hebrew is Linguistically Mad

“In an Increasingly Non-Binary World, Is Gendered Hebrew Willing to Adapt?” was the title of a recent article in the Times of Israel describing attempts to introduce non-gendered language into Israeli speech.

A more pertinent question might be: “In a world increasingly threatened by an assault on age-old categories of male and female, should the human race be willing to adapt?” But I’ll try to keep my personal views out of this. That’s hard to do, though, and especially when it comes to language. Men and women who liked the world the way it was when it was divided into men and women are able to stand up for themselves. Languages need someone to defend them.

The idea of freeing language from gender distinctions first arose, to the best of my knowledge, in the 1960s and 70s in America under the impact of feminism, and was initially restricted to English nouns like “stewardess” and “chairman” that marked someone’s sex. Since English has very few such nouns, it was easy to persuade most speakers to begin saying “flight attendant” or “chairperson.”