😡🤯 German is a gendered language. The female version of "Professor" is a "Professorin". If you wish to include everyone, it's become a great practice to write "Professor:in" (as I do) or some variant. One speaks it with a small stop.
Now Bavaria has outlawed this use of language by state employees, claiming it's ideologically motivated. If I were a professor in Bavaria, I could be sanctioned for the inclusive way I write.
Backlash against nature, women, immigrants ... it's all connected.
@tokensane yep, so it goes to show the problem with starting down that road, particularly in cases of state actors.
@tokensane all of them. They all play roles in the system, they all do work even if different types of work.
It's about power and control, but it's also about governments striving to be responsive to the populations, even if they miss the mark, since that's generally the source of notions of right and wrong in the governmental context.
When low level workers use their positions to take ideological stands that go against the ideology adopted by a responsive government as a whole, it's not surprising that there would be pushback from the top.
So yep, you could say it's about power and control, to use Machiavellian language, but it's hard to see how it could go any other way in a governmental institution.
If you're talking about the relationship between the US federal government and US states, that raises very different complications.
But this is not about what is okay or not okay. It's about what is.
A government responsive to its people will have policies that restrict what government employees can do.
@volkris @W_Lucht But OTOH banning it is *also* ideologically motivated.