You are a native French-speaker, right? I was wondering, do you know how one would refer to a non-binary as? Would it be on? Or ils? I don't really know. Thanks, and have a spectacular day.
It’s basically impossible to be neutral in French without a new set of pronouns. French is a highly binary language, so the “neutral” possibilities as they are today aren’t that non-binary either, neither respectful to human beings. "On" is deeply impersonal, that means that using it for people would sound like these people you’re talking to are barely worth objects. "Ils" is masculine so it’s by definition out of the topic, but it’s also plural and implies a distance. That’s not a pronoun you use to speak directly to people in French.
A solution exists though, as I already explained on the blog :
"Someone told me that Belgian LBGTQ associations use “iel” as a gender neutral pronoun, which I think is indeed a great “compromise” of both gendered pronouns and simple to understand. However, it is definitely not mainstream in France so you’ll probably have to explain. I personally wasn’t aware of it until a few days ago, even though I pretty much read every French content I could on the subject. Also, second problem with adjectives, is that they are gendered by nature (masculine by default if not specifically made feminine). The most common way to do, since you can’t have neutrality in grammar, is to actually mention both separated with dots so everyone’s represented. That works this way :
Il est joli. Elle est jolie. Iel est joli.e.
Ils sont jolis. Elles sont jolies. Iels sont joli.e.s.
Even if it is quite simple for adjectives which are pronounced the same regardless of their ending (Joli.e.s will always be pronounced “jo - lee” no matter how many e and s you all), it gets more complicated with adjectives which endings change with gender.
Example:Il est mignon. Elle est mignonne. Iel est mignon.ne.
For this example, the “neutral” pronunciation will still sound like the feminine form. It’s sort of fixed when written, but it still is an issue for speech. And for that, I have no solution to provide :(A gender neutral pronoun is a great first step, but if we truly want a gender neutral way to speak, that respect people as human beings, technically, we have to invent a complete new set of pronouns, adjectives, agreements… We still could, but as we mostly refer to objects in a gendered way, a non-gendered way would feel (at least to me) as if “neutral” human beings’ existence mattered less than objects’. For example, we have the neutral pronoun “ça” that we could still use, however put in context, it sounds like this :
C’est qui, lui ? > Who is he? C’est qui, elle ? > Who is she ?C’est qui, ça ? > Who/What is that ? > offensive.
In this case, we’d need a completely new pronoun, as “luel” maybe, to replace “ça”. But that’s just an example to see how delicate it is and why it is so complicated for a gender neutral way to speak to truly break through here. Hope it helps anyway.”
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