• Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    So, this is I have a dumb joke and need to explain far too much for it to be funny, but don’t think that would stop me:

    In German, we do this thing where nouns for jobs have gender, so a male teacher is a “Lehrer” and a female teacher is a “Lehrerin”.

    Now, if you want to refer to any teacher independent of gender, traditionally you used the male form.
    This was found to bias people to more readily employ men, worsening gender inequality. So, we started writing things as “Lehrer/in” to show that both genders are meant.

    Then several more genders got released, so to show that non-binaries are also included, we came up with the Gendersternchen™: Lehrer*in

    It’s the cousin of Rumpelstilzchen “gender asterisk” and very popular with the conservatives, I can assure you.

    Anyways, the dumb joke is that therefore ******* is the gender that’s so fluid, they had to just make it a bunch of Gendersternchen. 🙃