Written Permission
A while back, this journal started receiving emails. Politely hostile ones, written by people who consider themselves patient in direct proportion to how much they actually resent you. The subject: why don’t we use gender asterisks in our writing? If you don’t know what those are, you belong to a dwindling population of the mentally unbothered. If you do, you’re probably either someone who uses them or someone who reads this site specifically to confirm it still hasn’t gotten with the program.
For context: in German, the word for bus driver is Busfahrer, grammatically masculine by default. The gender asterisk writes it Busfahrer*in, the asterisk meant to mark the space for everyone the binary leaves out. Progressive media, left-leaning forums, and certain experimental school newspapers adopted this system with evangelical conviction. It has rough analogues in English—debates about "Latinx," "folx," singular they, actor versus actress—the same cultural war in different typography. We discussed the emails at length. By which I mean someone read them out loud while the rest of us ate pizza with THC butter and laughed. That was more or less the conclusion.
Here’s what I actually think. Gender asterisks are unreadable, look terrible, and are used overwhelmingly by people for whom the underlying cause is secondary to the performance of caring about it. Women still earn less than men. More people than before feel uncontained by a binary gender system. Caitlyn Jenner’s transition changed more minds in a year than a decade’s worth of asterisked manifestos. There are, depending on whose count you use, dozens of recognized gender identities now. Fine. None of this is resolved by a piece of punctuation.
The people pushing hardest for this kind of thing are also the people who demand gender quotas in prostate cancer support groups. Who address Chinese tour groups in German on the assumption they might secretly be from a suburb of Cologne rather than Beijing. Who wear solidarity T-shirts having never once left their own postcode. Who would ask their own hand for notarized written consent before masturbating—because what if the hand isn’t in the mood and they’ve violated its bodily autonomy? This is what genuine concern looks like after it’s been processed entirely through the mechanism of social performance. It becomes a parody of itself. And then, eventually, an argument for the people it was supposed to be opposing.
Political correctness—and gender asterisks are an unambiguous member of this category—has become a liability to the causes it claims to serve. Not because those causes are wrong. They aren’t. But the AfD and similar far-right movements across Europe use this material as recruiting propaganda. They point to the asterisk and tell the people they’re targeting: this is what the urban elite wants to do to your language, your culture, your sense of yourself. The frustrating part is that it lands that way even to people who might otherwise be persuadable. The format is doing active damage to the argument it was built to advance.
Some media outlets responded to the rise of right-wing populism by accelerating hard in the opposite direction—deploying every available signal to demonstrate that they are not those people. Not the AfD. Not Pegida. Not the identitarians. Look: the asterisk. Watch us use it again. They repeat the correct positions a dozen times a day to an audience that already agrees with every word. What they’ve built is an opinion bubble so hermetically sealed that the only feedback available is self-congratulation. They’re not persuading anyone new. They’re running a confirmation service for the already converted.
There’s a simple rule about telling people true things: say it every thirty minutes and they stop hearing it and start resenting you. If I told my friends every half hour that male chicks are ground up alive in hatcheries because they can’t lay eggs, it would be true every single time. It’s genuinely horrifying. After a week of this they would burn my house down to make me stop. Truth doesn’t require continuous repetition. Repetition doesn’t amplify truth—it exhausts the people listening and turns a conversation into a sermon nobody signed up to attend.
Gender asterisks aren’t just unreadable and ugly. They actively repel people who might have been open to the underlying conversation. Someone arrives at an article with genuine curiosity about gender or identity or language, reads one asterisked sentence, and feels—correctly—that they’re being administered a purity test they didn’t ask for. They close the tab. The potential audience contracts. The bubble tightens. Everyone inside congratulates each other on their clarity and courage.
My private theory is that this will eventually be revealed as an accidentally successful prank—typographical trolling that burrowed so deep into serious publications and earnest manifestos that nobody could admit they’d been had. The timeline would fit. The level of grammatical self-harm involved does suggest outside interference from someone who has been laughing about it ever since.
So: no. This journal will not be using gender asterisks, gender gaps, or whatever the next typographical innovation in this direction turns out to be. Not because the politics underneath are wrong, but because the delivery is broken, the audience it reaches was already there, and the audience it alienates was worth keeping. If you find that disappointing, I understand. But something tells me most people reading this are already where I am. And they’re not wrong.