I think we need to be a little more precise here since the debate this stems from is exclusively lead in German-speaking areas. This doesn’t mean that there is a ban on language that includes all, this is a ban of a very specific grammatical device.

In German, Jobtitles etc. have a (grammatical) gender, as opposed to English. So there is a “Verkäufer” (male Sales rep) and a “Verkäuferin” (female sales rep). While just using the male term is possible in German, it is usually not done for historical reasons (feminism fought hard for the mere existence of female workers and all).

So, it has become common to address both (for example for job offers), usually with a dash: “Verkäuferin/Verkäufer ab sofort gesucht” (“looking for sales rep immediately”). For my German readers: yes, this isn’t allowed anymore, it’s just used as.an example.

Since that is a rather clunky solution,. especially when you need it multiple times in a text, shortened Versions of this have been established. Since the female version is usually just an -in suffix, it has become custom to just write “Verkäufer/in”.

Now, since all societies start to be more aware that a hard cut between male and female might not be existing (go figure), a debate has sprung up if our language needs a new tool to deal with this. The most widely used attempt to expand our grammar to include all people regardless of their gender has been to replace the dash used by a wildcard. Common are “Verkäufer*in” or “Verkäufer_in”.

Conservatives have jumped on the issue of course.Think of it as the German equivalent to pronouns.

Now, of course there are people who do not reject the idea, but the execution, but those tend to get shoved into the transphobia camp and ignored.

Conservatives, especially the less radical ones (parties CDU and CSU), fear a further emergence of the more radical ones (AFD) who have of course drummed up their voters on this topic to obfuscate that they aren’t really up to anything that would benefit the little man, yet still need the little man to vote for them.

Now, CDU and CSU have started to really lean into their the radocal’s talking points and started pathetic laws to prevent government officials in some states to use wildcard characters instead of the “good old” dash. Other states have mandated the opposite and demand wildcard characters in all government writing.

The federal government is not very present in this debate at the moment. Some really clumsy attempts at gender-inclusive grammar have been made to the embarrassment of everyone (our traffic code uses rather weird grammar to omit gendered words entirely which is cringe worthy AF).

That’s the rundown so everyone is in the loop and can interpret what’s happening.