https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/nc0e77/france_bans_genderneutral_language_in_schools/

This article is about inclusive writing in French. The grammatical tl;dr is that in French, there is no easy way to talk about a group containing men and women in an "inclusive" way. The language is thought of as sexist because of a rule that makes the masculine form prevail whenever the gender of something is ambiguous, most notably for plural forms:

• Ils sont partis
• Elles parties
• Ils et elles sont partis

"Inclusive writing" regroups all the attempts at making the language non-discriminatory, by including forms such as "Ils et elles sont parti·e·s". This is all well explained in the article, which the redditors don't seem to have read.

The Romance languages are antitethical to gender-neutral language

Inclusive writing is not about removing genders from nouns. You still say "la chaise" and "le soleil" in inclusive writing.

Not at all. A gender-neutral pronoun could emerge naturally because languages evolve. The problem is people trying to force stuff artificially into a language, because it's not how languages work.

Uhh, "people artificially forcing stuff in the language" is how this rule of prevailing masculine form came out to be in the first place. It is totally a possible reason for a language to evolve.

The median-point writing is an ableist, fake-progressive attempt at not solving a problem which it itself has invented.

Well, yes, it's easy to dismiss every problem that anyone raises as "a problem you invented yourself". That's how raising a problem works, you notice a problem and make it salient.

French has the masculine and the feminine but it has no neuter. So how the fuck do you implement gender-neutral language in French?

Yeah, how, I wonder. Maybe they should write an article about it under the headline you read?

Good. Gender neutrality is a lie.

This take manages to be wrong both from a gender perspective and a grammatical perspective. Even if people could be neatly divided in "men" and "women", and non-binary people didn't exist, subjects such as "ils et elles" would still be gender neutral.

There is no Gender Neutral language in French. End of story. The chair is a She. The ceiling is a He. There is no gender neutrality. Gender Neutral "They and Them" automatically default to masculine pronouns. So if you want gender neutrality, you use the masculine pronouns, like for when you talk about objets.

Wait... if we're extending the rule of just having random arbitrary genders for every noun, then "gender neutral" in french would be "randomly pick a pronoun", not "always pick masculine". Where does this "masculine prevails" rule come from? Could it possibly be coming from the language being sexist? Maybe that's specifically the problem inclusive writing was designed to solve?

Lots of languages(French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese etc...)have male and female words, that’s not going to change.

Well, we're in luck that nobody is arguing that this should be changed then! Wait, why are you even talking about this?

Grammatical gender of nouns has no real meaning, they may as well be called "category A, B", or "category 1, 2"

Yup, congrats on noticing, you are a brilliant individual. What does that have to do with inclusive writing?

I applaud this, I don't get why anglophones want force romance languages to conform to fit their politics. Its the same kind of mentality that wants to force Latinos to use Latinx. Which close to no Latino wants, at least no those born and raised in Latin America

I'm sure you will be shocked to learn that inclusive writing in french is actually pushed by... french linguists.

The whole idea is ridiculous since the French language has genders for EVERYTHING

Those french linguists should have really thought of that! How could they not be aware that their language had genders for EVERYTHING??? I am very intelligent.

Anyway, it goes on and on for more than a thousand and three hundred comments but you get the point. This entire thread is bad and wrong and stupid, which incidentally makes it great content.