Giorgia Meloni is not a feminist. That is not her story. No woman on the right or centre-right who has held important political office, from Thatcher to Merkel, has ever called herself a feminist. Hence the non-sensitivity to the feminine declination of office, to which feminism instead attaches importance. Even if Angela Merkel at the end of her long chancellorship, during a meeting with the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, agreed to call herself a feminist. According to Alice Schwarzer, founder of the [...]

Incredibly -and with a secret vote, wickedly conceded by President Casellati- a few days ago, the Senate rejected the Maiorino amendment authorising women in the institutions to be called by their names. This issue has profound political relevance. Many poets over the centuries have made use of poetic licences, i.e. intentional grammatical, metrical and syntactic errors with the intention of emphasising a concept or altering the sonority of the composition. On 27 July 2022 at Palazzo Madama is [...]

In 2012, Argentina was the first country in the world to introduce self-id or gender self-identification into its legal system. Ten years later, it is one of the first countries to ban neutral language in schools. As taught by the mothers of radical feminism and difference thinking, the neutral is a red herring that actually brings the male point of view back to the centre. If the illusion of the neutral is less noticeable in the English language, it is immediately [...]

'Bodies with vaginas' is a strange way of referring to half the human race. Yet it was the expression that The Lancet, a medical journal, chose to publish on the cover of its latest issue, explaining to readers that 'historically, the anatomy and physiology' of such bodies had been overlooked. After complaints about dehumanising language, The Lancet apologised. But it is not alone: a growing number of officials and organisations find themselves speechless when it comes to using the [...]

"People who menstruate. I'm sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?". JK Rowling The Australian Senate has passed a motion preventing the federal government from using "gender-inclusive" language in any text. One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts moved the motion in the Senate and it passed 33 to 31. "Our biology and fundamental relationships are represented through the following definitions: [...]

THE EARTH If she had had to sit through Sanremo 2021 a few weeks ago, linguist Alma Sabatini would have regretted many things, not least the insistence with which a conductor asked to be called director. However, I don't think she would have been dismayed or desperate. As a fine sociolinguist, Sabatini knew how deeply embedded in the language we have been given is an androcentric principle that organises the linguistic universe around a male speaker. He knew how rigged is the dimorphism of the fourteenth-century/Baroque language [...].

Radical feminism has long since stopped using the term 'gender' to refer to sexual difference. In fact, it no longer uses it at all: "women and men" or even "the two sexes" are words that are perfectly fine and have the advantage that they cannot be misunderstood. Language is the human environment, the world is built with words, which is why they must be chosen carefully. Since the 1990s, the word gender has been completely redefined. Mary Daly had prophesied: of [...]