French is a gendered language, meaning that adjectives, nouns, articles, etc., have a gender. French officially has only two genders, masculine and feminine. Unlike English, where only pronouns and other few exceptions need to be tweaked to reflect the existence and identity of people who are outside of the gender binary, there still isn’t a consensus on what the best solution is for French. Unfortunately, French institutions like the Académie française in France or the Office québécois de la langue française in Québec strongly oppose reforming the language in favor of a more inclusive French language. The trans and non-binary community in all of the “francophonie” has nevertheless worked towards potential solutions.
Here at the Canadian League of Composers, we strongly support gender and sexual diversity. This is why we recently adopted a French language policy. We highly encourage music organizations and artists to adopt such a policy, be it inspired from our own guidelines or completely original.
The following guidelines have been prepared by our Assistant General Manager, Gabo Champagne. Most of the solutions have been inspired by the “Guide de grammaire neutre et inclusive” written by Divergenres, a community organization in Québec city. This guide is itself inspired by another resource brought up by the community, “Le petit dico de français neutre/inclusif” posted in the French blog “La vie en queer” (now down). This “dico” was made following a survey presented to the francophone queer community around the world where people were asked which pronouns and neologisms they were using the most or they would prefer. This resource is hence made for and by the community.
The language guide realized by Gabo Champagne is outlining her own preferences among all the possibilities proposed by other gender inclusive guides. Please note that there are sometimes no perfect solutions for a given word, so our guide sometimes makes a compromise using the “midpoint” (e.g. actif·ve), even though this shouldn’t be considered as a solution for all instances. Indeed, presenting both the feminine and masculine versions of a word doesn’t reflect identities outside of the gender binary. The use of the midpoint and other such exceptions is only in extreme cases where better solutions have yet to be suggested by the community.
As we have just recently adopted this guide, do note that it will take a while for all of our website to fully reflect our language policy. All future communications will nevertheless be made using these guidelines.
