Why Not Gender Stars

I’ve been getting emails, mostly angry, asking why I don’t use gender stars in my writing. Those asterisks in the middle of words—Busfahrer*in instead of the standard form. If you don’t know what these are, you’re lucky. If you do, you’re probably here wondering if I’ve finally cracked and started using them.

The argument’s straightforward. In German the default is masculine, which technically erases women. Use the asterisk and everyone’s included. Some feminist blogs, left-wing forums—they started doing it to make a point about the principle. The instinct isn’t wrong, but something got lost between the idea and how it actually works.

We debated it here once. Someone read the angry emails out loud while the rest of us ate and didn’t give it much thought. That was the whole discussion.

Gender stars are unreadable. When I see an asterisk in the middle of a word my eye breaks. I stop. And that’s the problem—if your solution to exclusion is language that’s harder to parse, you’re not actually fixing anything. You’re announcing that you’re thinking about the problem. Different thing entirely.

The real issue is these get used by people who need to be visibly correct. It’s not about who gets included; it’s about being seen thinking about inclusion. There’s something reflexive about it, this constant need to signal that you’re on the right side. The people it’s supposedly reaching? They see the asterisk and they see performance and they’re gone. You’ve lost a conversation that might have mattered.

So no, I’m not using gender stars. I’d rather write something people can actually read and engage with than something that makes me visibly, obviously correct.