(For my non-Finnish-speaking colleagues and friends: a non-native English version of ”Kieli pelon aseena” from December 2017.)

The black-and-white Finland of my childhood, the Kekkonen era, was still far from gender equality. Power belonged to men in grey suits, only sometimes was a token woman accepted into the group. At the same time, however, it was self-evident that gender equality was the goal we were aspiring to. And this was done in the traditional Finnish way, that is, by way of gender-blindness – the Finnish language, lacking grammatical genders, makes it very easy to leave male or female gender unexpressed – and by emphasizing that it is the work and its results that matter, not the gender (or any other personal characteristic) of whoever is doing the job. Successful women never emphasized their femininity but rolled up their sleeves and did the same thing as men (and often even better, because – as Lenita Airisto, the beauty queen turned businesswoman and media personality said already in those times – we will not have reached equality before a big enterprise hires a stupid and totally uncompetent woman for a leading position).

Nowadays, we may have taken some steps towards gender equality, but at the same time, things have become more complicated. Alongside women, sexual minorities also fight for equal rights, and the concept of gender itself now stands to debate: it is being deconstructed and questioned. Already as concerns biological sex, there are more than two of them, rather a spectrum or a continuum – the joint effects of genetic and hormonal factors create a small but far from non-existent group of diverse borderline cases. And gender as a psycho-socio-cultural category is even more complicated and problematic.

If we want to build a society in which all different forms of sexual/gender identity are treated equally, we must come to grips with the linguistic expressions of gender. In languages which have a system of grammatical genders connected to the male/female binary, creating practices which pay equal attention to all diverse possibilities can be really tricky. German is an excellent example of this. Most German human-referent nouns (such as agent nouns formed with -er) are grammatically male, and if we want to avoid the use of masculine generics (such as Lehrer ‘teacher’ referring to both male and female teachers), we must, in order to “make women visible”, use both the male word and its female derivative (Lehrerinnen und Lehrer ‘female and male teachers’) or resort to innovative orthographic solutions (LehrerInnen, Lehrer/innen or Lehrer_innen). But since this also excludes those who do not want to position themselves in the gender binary, it has recently been proposed that a star be used: Lehrer*innen would include all teachers, male, female, and those of “other” gender.

But even in Finnish, expressing gender can turn into a battlefield of ideologies, as shown last year by the debate aroused by the new language policies of the newspaper Aamulehti. The editors decided to explicitly aspire to gender-neutral language, which meant replacing occupational and other person-referent terms in -mies (‘man’) with neutral ones. For example, the president of the Finnish parliament, officially called puhemies ‘spokesman’, would be called puheenjohtaja. (The agent noun derivatives in -ja are, of course, gender neutral, because Finnish has no grammatical gender.) This provoked some quite aggressive reactions in Finnish media and social media.

All over Europe, conservative populism is now focusing on so-called gender ideology, that is, the basic idea of modern gender research: gender (as a social phenomenon, now generally called so in order to keep it distinct from sex, the biological characteristics) is a culturally constructed category, not only determined by whatever each person has between his or her legs. This is now depicted as an imminent danger: when gender (as this purported ideology is called at least in Eastern Central Europe) comes, it will bring with itself not only gender-neutral toilets, or perverts dancing on the streets in black leather bikinis (carnevalesque photo shots from gay pride parades are continuously used for frightening people in the state media in Putin’s Russia or in Orbán’s Hungary), it will not only give “deviant” people the right to be what they are. No, gender will come to your homes and your families, to schools, churches, and workplaces, it will forbid you to call boys “boys” or girls “girls”, it will destroy traditional families, marriages, and values. And, in fact, even the freedom of speech is under threat: in connection with the Aamulehti case, the journalist Sanna Ukkola in her column compared the gender-neutral language policy of a newspaper with witch hunts and the burning of books.

In November 2017, news of the liturgy reform in the Lutheran Church of Sweden was spread around the world. It was claimed that starting from Pentecost 2018, in Swedish churches it would be forbidden – as politically incorrect – to call God “Lord” or “Father”, or that from now on, God should be referred to with the gender-neutral pronoun hen which Swedish gender equality activists are trying to implement (replacing the traditional han ‘he’ and hon ‘she’). This piece of news was distributed on innumerable Internet fora. However, it doesn’t hold true, as the Finnish clergyman and journalist, Kimmo Saares, has patiently explained in his excellent Facebook posting.  The reform of some liturgic texts only continued the theological debate which has been going on since the first centuries of Christianity: Almighty God cannot be subject to such human categories as sex or gender. The new texts offer some gender-neutral ways of speaking of God, in addition to traditional ones – mainly so that instead of Herren (‘Lord’), Gud (‘God’) can be used more often. Moreover, the Holy Spirit will be referred to with a feminine form (den Heliga Anden), as in Hebrew and, accordingly, in the new Bible translation. The words ‘Lord’ and ‘Father’ or the male pronoun han have not been forbidden, the Lord’s Prayer remains in its traditional form, and clergymen and clergywomen can continue blessing their congregations “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”.

The fake news about the liturgy reform in Sweden were originally based on a misunderstanding by a Danish journalist. From the Danish newspaper Politiken, this error was quickly spread all over the world and believed even in “serious” quality media. (Not to speak of less serious ones. In Hungary, for instance, the right-wing populist online tabloid 888.hu wrote that the Swedish liturgy reform will “decisively change the act and even the theology of baptism, divine service, marriage and [sic] liturgy”, because from now on, God “can only be referred to with a gender-neutral pronoun”.) But the really interesting thing is that despite all corrections, the spreading of fake horror news continues. As Saares puts it, “even intelligent people troll”, even people who should know better are distributing fake news, because these fake news fit in with their general mistrust towards the Church of Sweden which they consider too liberal. “Even if it is not true, it could be”, because – in the immortal words of Riikka Slunga-Poutsalo, the secretary of the Finnish right-wing populist party – näin nämä asiat koetaan, “this is the way people experience these things.”

A similar case was seen in Austria in November 2017. The newspaper Kurier reported that the local leader of the right-wing populist party FPÖ in Upper Austria, Manfred Haimbuchner, had on his Facebook page expressed his outraged reaction to the new “gendered” family Bible and invited his followers to get scandalized as well:

Yesterday, the Bible department of the diocese of Linz presented a “gendered” “family Bible”. “God’s sons” have turned into “God’s children”, “man” into “human being”, and there is even an “Apostoless”. For me, this is impossible to comprehend! What do you think?

In his detailed answer (also quoted by the Kurier), the spokesperson of the Catholic diocese of Linz wipes the floor with Haimbuchner. This new Bible is not the work of the diocese of Linz, but the translation has been approved by the conference of Roman Catholic bishops of the whole German language area. That is, by an organ consisting of dignified, mature males raised and socialized in an authoritarian organization which rests heavily on tradition and conservative values – it is very difficult to regard these people as minions of anarcho-feminism or cultural Marxism. The translation is not new: it has been in use for more than a year already. Moreover, it hasn’t been “gender-neutralized” for ideological reasons but simply corrected, in the light of most recent research, to correspond better to the Hebrew and Greek original texts. For instance, the Hebrew word “fathers” should, considering its semantics, rather be translated as “parents”. Finally, the diocese remarks that a politician who time and again refers to “Christian values” should keep himself posted on what is happening in the church and in the study of the Bible, and promises to send him a copy of the new Bible translation to read.

All the three cases – the gender-neutral terminology policy of Aamulehti, the new liturgy of the Church of Sweden, and the outrage raised by the new Bible translation as presented by the diocese of Linz – have one thing in common: fear, or fear-mongering. They are coming to change our language and the words we use for important things. An excellent example of fear-mongering was given before the Finnish presidential elections (which took place in February 2018) by Laura Huhtasaari, Finland’s equivalent to Sarah Palin (also as concerns her fundamentalist “Christian” views about such things as evolution), the candidate of the right-wing populists. Already at the start of this online campaign interview (I don’t want to give the YouTube link here, but the video clip with pre-election interviews with Paavo Väyrynen and Laura Huhtasaari should be easy to find) she puts up the good old strawman claim about “girls” and “boys”:

The core message of my campaign is: Let’s take Finland back. Now we need alternatives, and I want to get back our safety, our decision-making, and let’s make Finland normal again. Girls and boys can be called “girls” and “boys”, and we won’t change this lovely, rich language of ours. And linguistic concepts [?!] are a really important part of our country [?!].

In other words: if we start talking about things with new names, that means “changing” or “forbidding” the old ones (censorship! bonfires of books! new theology!) – and from that point on, something will be irreversibly perverted and broken. In our language, there can and should be only one word for each concept: if we say Gud, that means that Herren is out. These words, in turn, shouldn’t change, because otherwise our “lovely, rich language” will be destroyed: if before more than a hundred years the decision was made to call the president of the Finnish parliament puhemies, we must continue using this term, or else something dreadful will happen.

Frightening people with linguistic revolutions is a powerful ideological weapon. Its power comes from the linguistic ignorance of most people, from the magical-mystical aura we love to develop around our languages and which hasn’t been dispersed by proper knowledge. (Perhaps because even in our days, even educated people in Europe do not seem to acquire this knowledge as part of what they learn about their mother tongue or other languages at school.) In this mythological view, words are no cultural products based on interpersonal conventions, but directly and organically connected to reality. And language is not an ever-changing result of historical processes, a multifaceted and variable phenomenon, but an eternal monument of eternal values.

In our world threatened by an ecological and climate catastrophe, it is essential that people, both political decision-makers and those who vote them into power, would understand more about science and what is often called the scientific world view (I hate the expression, because it is too strongly associated with the primitive opposition of naïve atheism and naïve religious fundamentalism). Social sciences and the humanities would help us understand such social categories as gender. But I still claim that in this world of political populism and superficial media hypes, it would be increasingly important for all people to know and to understand the essence of human language – so that language myths and fear-mongering wouldn’t be used for mobilizing them against strawmen instead of real problems.