This is a post by Martina Rosola (University of Barcelona).
Gender is expressed differently in each language. While in English, personal pronouns an a handful nouns are the only gendered words, in so-called grammatical gender languages, like Italian, German or Spanish, gender is everywhere (cf. Stahlberg et al. 2007). In these languages, several linguistic items are gendered: nouns, articles, adjectives, and some verbs. Crucially, the grammatical gender of a personal noun reflects its referent’s gender (see Corbett 1991): feminine personal nouns are used for women and masculine ones for men. But what about non-binary people, that is, people that do not identify exclusively as either men or women? Binary grammatical gender systems, where masculine and feminine are the only genders available for human reference, provide no appropriate way to refer to non-binary people. Consequently, non-binary people are referred to either in the feminine or in the masculine and are, thus, systematically misgendered (that is, they are referred to with expressions that do not align with their gender identity). In this paper, I argue that this case is different from using the masculine to refer to women and that the structural misgendering of non-binary people gives rise to a distinctive type of injustice, namely to an instance of what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls “hermeneutical injustice”.
Notwithstanding a general correspondence between grammatical and referential gender for personal nouns, there are cases where this correspondence fails. This happens when non-binary people are referred to with masculine or feminine words, but also, for example, when women are referred to with a masculine job title. In Italian, for instance, a physician is invariably called “medico”, in the masculine, even when they are women, giving rise to a discrepancy between the noun’s and its referent’s gender. However, I focus on the discrepancies that concern non-binary people because, unlike those concerning women, they depend on a structural feature of the language. Speakers could choose the feminine job titles when talking about women: they could use the feminine form “medica” for a woman physician. When referring to non-binary people, instead, speakers cannot choose a, so to speak, non-binary form because there’s none available: the only options are binary. So, in this case, it’s not a matter of (mis)use, but rather of structure: the issue is not what form the speaker chooses, but which options the language provides. This feature is a first cue that we’re dealing with hermeneutical injustice, an type of injustice caused by “a gap in collective interpretive resources” (Fricker 2007: 1). The collective interpretative resources in this case are the (binary) language and the gap is the lack of a non-binary grammatical gender.
Of course, for this gap to cause injustice, it has to have detrimental effects. This is the case because, as seen above, due to the lack of a non-binary grammatical gender non-binary people are systematically misgendered. Indeed, they are regularly referred to with binary terms, namely in the feminine or masculine. As Kapusta (2016) argued with respect to transgender women, misgendering is morally problematic: it causes psychological harm, undermines the subject’s self-respect, limits their access to goods and services, and impedes them to contribute to determine what “woman” socially means, what are the features we associate with womanhood. The latter is an instance of hermeneutical marginalization, a notion introduced by Fricker (2007) referring to the exclusion of a group of people from a practice that would have value for them – such as contributing to the social meaning of gender. I argue that non-binary people in contexts where a binary language is spoken, by being systematically misgendered, are subject to the same harms. In particular, I focus on their resulting hermeneutical marginalization: by being referred to in the feminine or masculine, non-binary people are represented as if they belonged to these genders. This reinforces the idea that these are the only genders and neglects non-binary people’s contributions to the definition of what gender is and what genders are there. It further makes it more difficult to understand what “non-binary” means: after all, we even lack the words to properly describe it; the obvious consequence is that someone speaking about non-binary gender identities would contradict themself in terms. Crucially, this is caused by a structural feature of binary languages: the lack of a non-binary grammatical gender. Hence, I argue, it is an instance of hermeneutical injustice, that is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization” (Fricker 2007: 158): since non-binary people are prevented from contributing to defining gender (that is, because of their hermeneutical marginalization), a significant area of their social experience (namely, their gender identity) is unintelligible to the rest of society.
In this paper, I argue in detail that the effects of binary grammatical gender systems have all the hallmarks of systematic hermeneutical injustice. “So what?”, one might ask. This analysis can serve important political and practical goals. I don’t discuss them explicitly in this paper, but they have been explored in the debate on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. On the one hand, exposing the harms caused by binary grammatical gender systems can be used to illustrate the need for overcoming them. As Klieber’s (2025) reply to my paper points out, several are the proposals to do so, but many people simply refuse to adopt them. Pointing out that the current linguistic structure causes injustice might motivate them to make the effort and use the non-binary alternatives out there. Moreover, the analysis I offer can help identifying the antidote to the issue. This aspect has been explored by Kapusta’s (2025) reply to my paper, drawing on Dotson’s (2014) distinction between first- and second-order exclusions and the relative different change needed to overcome them.
To conclude, binary grammatical gender systems cause hermeneutical injustice with respect to non-binary people and this is a reason, I believe, for overcoming them. Mastering the mechanism giving rise to the injustice is a further help towards understanding how to ameliorate these grammatical gender systems.
To read more about this, see my article, “Linguistic Hermeneutical Injustice”, published in Social Epistemology (2024), 39(4), 425–435. A preprint version is freely available on PhilPapers.
I am a Juan de la Cierva fellow at the University of Barcelona. In March 2021, I earned a PhD in Philosophy from FINO Consortium, in Northern Italy. During my PhD, I spent visiting periods at the University of Sheffield and the University of Waterloo to work with Jennifer Saul. I specialize in the Philosophy of Language, Feminist Philosophy, Semantics, and Pragmatics. My main interest is the role of language in systems of injustice and how it can serve to either perpetuate or dismantle them. Within this perspective, I worked on generics, the linguistic form stereotypes typically take, and I am currently working on gender-fair language.
Open Philosophy 