Three years ago, the city of Hanover was one of the first cities in Germany to declare gender-sensitive language to be a binding norm in administration.

The “lectern” has since been a “lectern”, from “voters” to “voters”.

The salutation “Dear Sir or Madam” should also be avoided by the employees of the Lower Saxony state capital.

People who “do not describe themselves as women or men”, they say, could feel discriminated against.

In Hanover, people also fall back on the gender star (citizens).

Reinhard Bingener

Political correspondent for Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Bremen based in Hanover.

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There was "a lot of negative feedback on the language requirements of the city, which was critical to insulting," says the equal opportunities officer Friederike Kampf (Greens).

In the meetings of the city council and the committees, the AfD regularly refuses to approve the minutes because the statements of the AfD council members are also gendered there, although they attach importance to the fact that they would not have gendered in their speeches.

Since the gender language regulations of the city of Hanover are not in line with the official rules of the Council for German Spelling, doubts are sometimes even expressed about the validity of city decisions.

The FAZ has now received a comprehensive legal opinion that the Lower Saxony state capital commissioned on the issues raised. The author is Ulrike Lembke, Professor of Public Law and Gender Studies at Humboldt University. The 123-page long text could rekindle the debate about gender-sensitive language in Germany, because the professor from Berlin goes beyond just making the new language rules in Hanover a permissible option. Rather, Lembke derives from the Basic Law an obligation for government agencies to use gender-sensitive language in the future and also to forego binary salutations such as “Dear Sir or Madam”."The obligation to linguistic non-discrimination exists by constitution and can be made more concrete through legal regulations or administrative regulations, decrees and instructions," writes Lembke.

Are not only authorities responsible?

The starting point of their argumentation is the third article of the Basic Law, which says among other things: “Men and women have equal rights” and since an addition in 1994: “The state promotes the actual implementation of equal rights for women and men and works to eliminate existing ones Disadvantages. "

The Berlin professor derives from this a far-reaching mandate to “overdue de-privileging” of men, even in administrative language. "The basic right to equality is an anti-patriarchal prohibition that works in favor of women and is oppressed by the socially dominant group of men," she writes. "This is not just about disadvantages that are linked to gender roles, but about overcoming disadvantageous gender roles as such." By using gender-appropriate language in its own area of ​​competence, the state should contribute to a fair design of gender relations in society as a whole.

The Berlin professor does not only see administrations in the narrower sense as having a duty.

Courts and other state or state-related institutions should also have to use gender-sensitive language.

The report does not comment on the situation in schools, where the problem that the language requirements collide with the applicable spelling rules arises particularly vehemently.

"Gross violation of rule of law principles"

Overall, the expert attests that the German administrations often neglect their commitment to the law when implementing and using gender-sensitive language “in gross violation of the rule of law”. That is a grave allegation. The question also arises as to how Lembke's derivation of a duty to different decisions by democratically legitimized politicians, who recently explicitly forbade gender-appropriate language, behaves: the states of Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein have issued regulations for schools to prevent the use of gender stars .In her function as Minister of Justice, the SPD politician Christine Lambrecht also banned the use of gender stars by the highest federal authorities, invoking the requirements of the Council for German Spelling. He is sharply attacked in Lembke's report. She holds before him the "presumption of a regulatory competence without basic rights orientation".