THEn Argentina the use of inclusive language will be prohibited and “everything that concerns a gender perspective” in public administration. The project for the country of the new far-right, ultra-liberal and populist president Javier Milei is starting to take shape. A decision, in fact, perfectly aligned with the policies against gender equality that Milei has decided to pursue in various ways since he took office last December.
Argentina bans the use of inclusive language
A few days before March 8ththe Milei government accelerates and, as promised, attacks and provokes the feminist movement considered a bitter “enemy”. Therefore, the Government explains, «it will not be possible to use the “e”, the at sign, or the x”in order to avoid the unnecessary inclusion of the feminine in all public administration documents”.
The irony of social media
Everyone in the Executive agrees to support the attack, symbolic and material, so much so that even the Argentine Ministry of Security, led by a woman Patricia Bullrich, has decided that it will be «the use of so-called inclusive language is also prohibited within the Ministry of Defense, of the Armed Forces and of the decentralized bodies of the ministry”. The announcement had a strong resonance and the irony was also unleashed on social media, with jokes and questions like «the abolition of the use of the snail will it stop people from writing emails?”.
Argentina’s President Javier Milei has banned inclusive language in public administration (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP)
What’s happening in Argentina
To understand what is happening, It should be noted that Spanish, like Italian, only has a feminine and a masculine gender: therefore, saying “hello everyone” can mean a greeting valid for men only, but also for a group of women and men. As language experts have pointed out, however, Argentine Spanish is a spoken language and therefore changes as society changes. Which led to the desire to also change the male vision of the world imposed by culture.
Promoting gender equality is not Milei’s business
For decades, in fact, we experiment with alternative ways to decline certain words, to avoid the overextended masculine plural used as neuter, but also to be able to refer to non-binary people. Nothing so exceptional, however, given that the United Nations itself has established that «Using inclusive language is an extremely important way to promote equality gender and fight prejudice.”
The President against equality
But, evidently, it is precisely this that annoys and scares the President and his Government: after all, it is he who has denied several times the existence of a wage gap between women and men, confirmed however by the data, and it is always he who eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity. Not stopping but also attacking the right to abortion, with his party, Libertad Avanza, which presented a proposal to repeal the law on voluntary termination of pregnancyapproved in December 2020.
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