Inclusive languages. The names of the human rainbow

Intervention held by Vera Gheno* at the meeting "Corner Stones” (Firenze, 5 aprile 2025). Trascrizione rivista dall’autrice, realizzata dai volontari de Jonathan's tent

I found myself often - and I continue to find myself - to work with what we could call the progressive fringes of the religious world, not only Catholic or Christian, but also of other cults. So I have no negative prejudice towards these contexts.

This type of dialogue exists, and for me it is very important, also because I believe that those like yours are among the contexts in which more reflects on the value of the word. That is, on the word there are many metacognitive discussions, perhaps more than elsewhere, and therefore hybridizations are welcome.

I wanted to face two issues. The first is that yes, I deal with language. But the accusation that is addressed to me most often is that, speaking of language, I would not deal with other issues, of "more serious" problems. Often it is said: "But the problems are very others!"And examples are out of examples such as the question of agentis appointment female, autonomous itself in the LGBTQ+community, or the way we talk about disability, etc. In short, we tend to minimize: "Eh oh well, they are just words, the real problems are others".

I imagine that you too, in your contexts, have found yourself having to face this type of benaltrism, which insinuates itself easily everywhere. How to respond to Benaltrism, especially when it concerns the relationship between language and reality?

So: we humans have the logos, the word, as a cognitive matrix to understand reality. We know the world through words. The Bible already teaches it, in the book of Genesis: Adam appoints animals, birds, every creature. The sense of appointing reality is precisely to be able to speak. We appoint experiences, objects, phenomena, because so we can do something that - as far as we know - is exclusively human: to exchange information. The word makes information in space and time transportable.

Possiamo così comunicare a distanza, oppure lasciare tracce che durano migliaia di anni: leggiamo testi antichi, registriamo voci che possono essere ascoltate ovunque, se c’è Internet. Non siamo più limitati alla presenza fisica. E sottolineo questo aspetto perché è uno degli argomenti principali a favore della cura della parola. Qualunque sia l’istanza che vi sta più a cuore – la situazione in Palestina, le manovre contro la comunità transgender, i diritti delle persone con disabilità, il problema della casa – per parlarne, servono le parole.

La competenza linguistica attraversa tutti gli ambiti. Non faremo mai una manifestazione senza le parole, né un’assemblea, né un ragionamento collettivo. Dire che “le parole sono solo parole” non coglie che fra lingua e realtà esiste una relazione profondissima, e complessa. Non è una relazione a senso unico. Non è che la realtà cambi la lingua e basta, oppure che la lingua cambi magicamente la realtà, come fossimo a Hogwarts.

C’è una relazione complessa, quasi “quantistica”, come diceva Benjamin Lee Whorf negli anni ’30: toccare uno dei due piani ha effetti anche sull’altro. Le parole non cambiano direttamente la realtà – non sono formule magiche – ma cambiano la narrazione della realtà. E se cambia la narrazione, come dice bene Iacopo Melio, può nascere il desiderio di cambiare anche la realtà stessa.

The word acts on the way we see the world: on the imaginary, on traditions, on judgments, on Prejudices. changing the way of speaking can also help change the way you think. This is the central point.

I give you an example. It concerns disability, which is outside the LGBTQ+area, but it is very significant.

In recent decades we have made a very long journey. When I was young, thirty years ago, the word "handicapped" was commonly used. Then we moved on to use "disabled" as a noun and two ways opened: on the one hand "disabled", on the other "person with disabilities" or "disabled person". It must be said that "handicap" comes from sport: it indicates a mechanism to compensate for differences, for example in horse racing or in golf (the sport preferred by President Trump, who in these days is dedicated to Golf, given that nothing happens in the world ...).

Use "disabled" as a noun, however, has the problem of reducing the person to one feature, and that is why we prefer to say "person with disabilities", according to the principle of the "person first" ("first the person"). That is: it is not the disability that defines who you are, you are first of all a person. The "disabled" formula, on the other hand, is an excess of politically correct that does not even come from the community of people with disabilities.

I do not recommend it to you: not only because it seems to suggest that every disabled person has superpowers (and it is not so), but also because it transmits the idea that disability is something to be ashamed of, to be "camouflaged". It is the same mechanism that leads to using "blind" instead of "blind" or "unhealthy" instead of "deaf", when instead blind and deaf people safely use these terms to self -refine themselves. So much so that their associations are called precisely "Italian Union of the Blind" and "National Deaf Authority".

Today, especially in the anglophone world, the expression "person Disabled" or "disabled" (disabled "(disabled"disabled person). It is not a detail: "person disabled" pushes to ask himself from what or by those who have been disabled. The reflection is that very often disability is not a problem of the person, but of society that cannot welcome that characteristic.

Think about it: if the human standard was to be born without legs, the whole company - trains, schools, sidewalks - would be made of wheelchair. So the disability often depends on the context, not on the person. Talking about "disabled person" helps to move the focus: from individual to collective liability. This is a concrete example of how the change of words can also change the perception of reality.

Talking about words, therefore, does not mean staying on the surface. This is not a patina, a "Washing" (type "Rainbow Washing", "Green Washing", etc.). Words must remain hooked to reality. My dear colleague Federico Faloppa - a linguist so good that in fact he works in the United Kingdom, because we often go away from us - always says that the words must be bolted to reality. And I like this image very much. So, all my speech on words does not only concern appearance, but touches deep levels of reality.

Having said that, I saw that among the questions that came to me there are some who talk about inclusion. So: inclusion is not enough for me. Strongly context the limits of the concept of inclusion. And I didn't get there on my own. You see it: I am a white woman, heterosexual, cisgender, without particular atypical characteristics.

If you look at me in a hurry, you seem almost a "normal" person (then there are these unfortunate tattoos that tell another story, but oh well). Perhaps precisely because of my point of view, at the beginning "inclusion"And"inclusiveness"They seemed to me beautiful words. Then, thanks to Fabrizio Acanfora - dear friend and colleague, autistic and homosexual person - I began to see the limits.

Fabrizio invited me to go and see the definition of "inclusiveness" on Zingarelli: "ability to include, welcome, not discriminate"It seems beautiful, no? Too bad that, in the definition, nothing of those included, welcomed and not discriminated against. The perspective remains that of the" we "who include" them ".

There is always a first and after: first I exclude entire categories, then - in a motion of benevolence - I decide to bring them back. But I continue to consider them "others" compared to me. And this creates a unbalanced dynamic: we are, normal, and they, the different ones.

We include them yes, but without giving them agency, without leaving them the opportunity to decide how, when and in what shape they want to be included.

For example:

• We grant LGBTQ couples+ civil unions, but not the wedding.
• We mount the access ramp for people with disabilities, but we avoid talking about their sexuality, as if they were "asexual angels".

Inclusion too often means talking about a group ... without that group. Speak "of them" without "them".

Things are slowly changing, but there is still a lot of way to go. And since I believe in work on words, I follow Fabrizio's thought: we have to go beyond inclusion. For me, the goal is to get to coexistence of differences. I did not invent it, nor Fabrizio, who however inspired me on the theme, but we are among those who carry it forward. What changes?

With coexistence, I recognize that all people - with all their characteristics (Basaglia said: "Upon close nobody is normal") - they sit around the same table and decide together. It is no longer "I include you", but "we build together".

A coexistence company is not measured only by the absence of discrimination. It is measured by the fact that all people - disabled, queer, racialized, anyone - have access to the places of power.

It is no longer enough to be "accepted" or "tolerated": you have to be participated, protagonists. That this is missing clearly by observing the phenomenon of the "pipe he loses" (leaky pipeline). It happens almost everywhere: at the base of the company, theoretically, everyone is included - at least on paper -, as our Constitution also says.

But then, as you go up to the levels of power, diversity disappears. And at the top we find homogeneous lounges of power: white, heterosexual, cisgender, able -bodied and male. I see it at university, but if you look at politics it is the same story. There has been some opening, especially as regards the female presence in the places of power, but often they are isolated women. And, in many cases, these are women who have "virilized", that is, that they have taken on very male ways, also explicitly detaching themselves from feminism, as if it were something negative or incompatible with power.

So, everything i say on the language has two fundamental characteristics:

1. Go beyond inclusion: Because inclusion is a first step, but that's not enough.
2. Hold connected word and reality: Never disconnect the words from the concrete action.

At this point, resuming to the questions you sent me, I arrive at the matter:

Is it possible to have a more inclusive Italian?

Here, I prefer to talk about large language rather than inclusive language. I most often deal with the question of the genre, but always with a vision as far as possible intersectional.

Large language is a vision of the language as a complex system, in constant change, capable of adapting to the needs of its community of speakers.
And the community of speakers includes all and all: disabled people, queer, racialized, migrants ... they are not bodies foreign to the language, they are an integral part. When new expressions are born in some groups, when old linguistic formulas are questioned, this is not an attack from the outside, but a natural movement, which is born from below, from the roots.

These attempts at linguistic change should not be underestimated. Every time you discuss language, in reality, we are also talking about powers, of hierarchies, of social change. Antonio Gramsci already said it, I'm not inventing it to me: every battle on the language hides a battle on society. So, it is not a simple question of grammar or aesthetics: behind it there is a profound rethinking of the way we want to live together.

And then we come to talk about a fundamental point: italian is a binary language. Deriving from the Latin - like all the neolatine languages ​​- Italian has preserved only two grammatical genres: male and female. The Latin neutral has been lost.

If you browse all the vocabulary, you will not find any marked noun as a neutral: there is only male and female. Some words are both male and female (such as "analyst", "teacher"), but the system is binary.

A language is always an emanation of the society that speaks it. It is not an abstract system: it is within a story, a culture, a world view.

In his beautiful book Queer. Cultural history of the LGBT+ community (Einaudi, 2021), Maya De Leo explains well that our western cultures were built around the idea of ​​the male man: "Anner" in Greek, "Vir" in Latin. Not homo in the sense of being human, but just male. The whole social structure was male hundredthric: the man in the center, and around him women, children, racial people, anyone who was considered "other".

And this also had effects on languages. Just think that until the end of the 18th century the science itself considered the female body as a bad variation of the male body! For example, the uterus was seen as testicles "grown badly" inside the body. The clitoris as an "aborted penis".

Women were considered, at an anatomical level, only the defective versions of men. When finally the female body began to seriously study, the modern idea of sexual dwelling: There are males, there are females, everything else is pathology or deviation. This binary vision has had enormous reflections: in laws, in medicine, in art ... and obviously also in the language.

We then arrive at the knot: in Italian, when we talk about human beings, we tend to associate the grammatical genre with the perceived genre: male for those who seem male, female for those who look like female. But be careful: we don't do it on the basis of a biological data. None of us check the chromosomes of those who meet! We base ourselves on appearance, on how a person presents himself.

For example: Drusilla Foer - which is Giorgio Gori in life - when he is "drusilla", presents herself as a woman. And therefore we call it to the female. When Giorgio Gori returns, we call him to the male. We use the language based on the identity of gender manifested, not on biological data. This system, for a long time, worked. But he also had a side effect: he built a very rigid binarism.

If you are not clearly male or clearly female, you are put in the pathology box. There is no third "normal" option in the traditional scheme: either you are a man, or you are a woman, or you are "wrong". This concerns both intersex people and transgender or non -binary people. Now, all this has nothing to do with the Latin neutral. Non -binary people, Gender Fluid, Genderqueer, Two Spirits are not "neutral". They are people who exist outside of gender binarism, but not for this they must be considered "without gender" or "neutral".

The problem arises when we must linguistically represent all this variety.
If I say "good evening to all", I use the supersesty male, as per tradition. But so invisible all the real diversity of the people present. Because the supersesty male is not neutral: it is male. And the fact that it was chosen as "standard" is the reflection of male centrality in history, culture, art, philosophy. It is a mechanism that is self -altitude.

Just think of school books: I, at school, before the university, have never studied a philosopher. Maybe now every now and then Hannah Arendt or Judith Butler appears, but otherwise the canon remains crushed on the male. The same goes for literature, for art, for the history of science. So it is natural that the male is dominant in the language. It is the reflection of a world where the male has been the center for centuries.

Now: greater linguistic visibility corresponds to greater social visibility. That's why we started saying "Good evening to all and to everyone". For me it was natural, after discovering the existence of all the people out of binarism, to ask me if you could go even further: not only "all and all", but to find ways of speaking that did not cancel those who do not recognize themselves in one or the other.

There are various solutions. What i adopt most often is to use circumlocations:

• "Good evening to all the people present"
• "Good evening to those in the room"

Thus I avoid the supranese male without having to resort to too experimental forms that would risk creating barriers. Why? Because, as I always say, I want make me understand.

In the most aware contexts - such as at the Cassero di Bologna or at the Mario Mieli club in Rome - more experimental forms are used. Type: "Good evening with tutt" or "good evening at the tuff", thus, pronouncing the symbol of the astterisk, in fact.

But why the U? Because in Italian all grammatical vowels are occupied except U. the Spaniards are luckier: they have the and free, and can say "Todes", "amigues", etc. We, on the other hand, if we use the U, we risk looking for Campania ("Tutto") or Sardinian ("Tutto"), and this, be careful, is not neutral: in Italy anti -meteridionism is still very strong. It is no coincidence that in the petition against the use of Schwa - the one on Change.org launched by the linguist Massimo Arcangeli - reads the phrase "we will all talk like southerners", as if it were a problem.

Now, on Schwa ("ə") I don't go too far. If you want, find my Tedx on YouTube that explains everything in fifteen minutes. But I tell you this: use Schwa (or asterisk *) creates real problems for those who use assistance technologies, such as vocal readers for blind or visually impaired.

Even those who have dyslexia or those who do not have an Italian as a mother tongue can find an obstacle. So Schwa is fine as a symbolic choice, in restricted and aware contexts. But it is not suitable for general communication.

In official communications of schools, for example, the presence of Schwa or astterisk is ridiculously low (less than 1% of the documents!). Yet Minister Valditara built a crusade against Schwa. It is clear that this question is being used to distract public opinion from much more serious problems in the school.

Then, how to make Italian more inclusive? Without extremes.

Where I can, I try to reduce the use of the Superovese male, without slipping into experimental formulas that risk excluding who we would like to include. Because there is an important fact: in Italy, about 33% of the population is in conditions of illiteracy or seeds - return illiteracy. If we use a language too complex or symbolic, we risk cutting the most fragile people out.

On this I also found confirmation by reading Franco "Bifo" Berardi and Brigitte Vasallo.
Both talk about semi -socialism: the risk of transforming symbols (linguistic) into social exclusion tools. I don't want to become a semi -ciotvistic of the language. I don't want to build an inclusive language only for those who have cultural tools to understand it. I want to build a truly accessible, truly shared language.

So yes, I avoid the supranese male where I can. But I don't push on forms that would exclude those who need more to feel part. More than giving you definitive recipes, I leave you a perspective:

Consider the human variety not as a problem, but as a resource.

Diversity is a resource for humanity. Where there is homogeneity - even genetic -, there is stagnation and risk. Diversity instead is life.

Will we be able to build a society truly based on the coexistence of differences?
I do not know. Perhaps, as Tommaso Moro said, it is not a question of reaching Utopia, but of having a direction to walk.

Even if you never get there, it is worth trying. And so, at the end of the psalms, my words are words of hope.

* Real Gheno he is sociolinguist and popularizer, with numerous years of teaching at the University of Florence and a long collaboration with the Academy of Crusca. Has signed essays that have become real tools to understand contemporary language, such as Power to words, Singular female and Keep it on (with Bruno Mastroianni). "Norm is normal” (UTET, 2025) è la sua diciassettesima monografia. Conduce il podcast “Amare parole e, da anni, è una delle voci più chiare nel promuovere un linguaggio più consapevole, inclusivo e umano.

> The other interventions held at the "corner stones" meeting (Florence, April 5, 2025)