T  h  ə      T  y  p  ●  g  r  ♀  p  h  y     ◎   f     G  ♂  n  d  𓁹  r

The three texts on this page discuss attempts to make gender—its presence and its absence—visible in written language through typography.


S h i f t i n g    S y m b o l s  :    T h e    G e n d e r    S t a r

    By Meg Miller | Originally published by Source Type

How do you pronounce an asterisk? Not the word but the symbol, the actual typographic mark. That five-sided star that’s tacked onto words, floats above letters; the smattering of hatch marks written quickly by hand, a neat little tick typed on the computer, or with ends as swollen as the petals of a cartoon flower. Some symbols aren’t meant to be spoken, and the asterisk seems to be one of them, though it’s silently understood in all its various positions: Affixed to the end of a sentence as a footnote, an addition, a correction, or an afterthought. The staid stand-in for the vowels in a profanity; an expression of *emphasis.* A bullet point, an ornamental separator between sections, a bejeweled breath between texts. The asterisk is voiceless but adaptive, its meanings and uses have seemingly multiplied over time, reflecting the malleability of language. Most recently, in Germany, the asterisk has taken on the role of the Genderstern, or gender star, a symbol that denotes gender-neutrality when tucked into the middle of the language’s gendered nouns. In spoken language, the gender star is pronounced as a pause.

“Liebe Designer*innen—das solltet ihr unbedingt lesen!” my friend Ann says in a voice message sent over text. It’s a demonstration, a phrase simple enough to be understood by a German language novice—Dear designers—you should definitely read this!—but I’m also listening closely for the unspoken. After “Designer” is a clipped pause, nearly quick enough to miss, before the feminine plural ending -innen. It’s what’s called a glottal stop in linguistics, a brief stop of air flow in the vocal track, as between the vowel sounds in uh-oh. In Ann’s sentence, the stop means asterisk and the asterisk means that the designers in question are not specified as male (der Designer) nor female (die Designerin), but as designers of mixed or indeterminate, of any or all, genders (die Designer*innen). Much more than just the sign of a pause, the gender star, aloud and on paper, serves as a corrective to a long held norm, the re-insertion of a faulty omission, a tiny but persistent political statement. It’s a “typohack,” to use a term by designer Hannah Witte—an imperfect but necessary quick fix as language catches up with cultural and societal change.

In the German language, nouns are either masculine, feminine, or neutral. A male singer is a Sänger while a female is a Sängerin. Plurals of course are gendered too, making two or more female singers a group of Sängerinnen, though even the presence of one male singer will turn an entire chorus male (Sänger). This linguistic sleight of hand is called the generic masculine, a term also familiar to English speakers, as it describes the stand-in of masculine pronouns or masculine-specific terms for all of humanity (*sigh*). Though language purists still argue for the innocuousness of using he as a shorthand, and the inconvenience (he or she) or grammatical incorrectness (they) of inclusivity, there’s been a notable shift away from the generic masculine in recent years. In Germany there are similar debates, though any solution is more complex than swapping out pronouns or inventing a new one (ze). That’s because addressing gender equitability in the German language means addressing thousands upon thousands of nouns, with their gendered articles (der, die, das) and gendered suffixes.

It’s a big task for a small star. But the asterisk is only the latest in a string of inventive linguistic solutions that stretch back decades, to the late-1970s. “Previously, there was no room [for women] in these mountains, called ‘mother tongue’ (of all things),” writes the feminist linguist Luise F. Pusch, author of Das Deutsche als Männersprache (German as a Men’s Language). Pusch was one of a group of linguists who in the ’70s and ’80s proposed that the German language was antagonistic towards women, giving as a prime example the use of the generic masculine in mixed or unspecified company. If students, professors, employees, bosses, and politicians were masculine by default, they reasoned, it rendered women practically invisible in these spaces, and that didn’t mirror reality. These linguists proposed the use of the Binnen-I, or “inner I,” which inserted a capital “I” into the feminine suffixes (-in or -innen) to signal that a word could be either male or female. The main benefit to this typographic solution was economy: instead of having to say or write Sänger und Sängerin in a language already characterized by lengthiness, the use of SängerIn would imply both genders in one word. The capital “I” also has the benefit of being seen but not heard, so that when speaking it just sounds like you’re using the generic feminine, a kind of corrective to hundreds of years of the opposite.

Predictably, the Binnen-I had its critics, who complained that it didn’t comply with official language standards, that it was clunky or ugly or unnecessary, that changing language is sacrilege, as if language isn’t changing all the time. But it was adopted widely among feminists, and has held on throughout the decades even as other typographic conventions have been introduced, like the use of the slash (Sänger/in), colon (Sänger:in), period (Sänger.in), or brackets (Sänger(in)). You’ll still see the Binnen-I used sometimes today. In the 1990s, feminist linguist Matthias Behlert proposed that it was only fair to add a masculine ending and a third ending called divers (diverse) to accompany the feminine ending. The female ending would stay the same, sans male ending (Sängerin), while new endings for male (Sängeris) and divers (Sängeril) would be invented.

In the early 2000s, however, feminists began to discuss how the Binnen-I reinforced a male-female binary; the rigid capital “I” didn’t leave any room for other genders, or for those who don’t identify with a gender at all. In 2003, Steffen Kitty Herrmann came up with the gender gap, which addressed this problem. As s_he explains in a paper titled “Performing the Gap,” the gender gap is a response to how the German language’s articles and endings reinforce “the illusion of two cleanly separated genders” and deny anything outside of this binary. Hermann proposes inserting an underscore between the male and female ending, creating a blank space inside of the word, which represents everyone who identifies beyond the two-gender norm. “This marks the place that our language does not allow .... Placed just between the boundaries of a rigid gender order, it is the spatialization of the invisible, the permanent possibility of the impossible.” The underscore literally pushes aside the two normative genders and makes space for you, the reader, whoever you are.

Even more poetic, I think, is the dynamic (or “wandering”) gender gap, which uses Hermann’s underscore but doesn’t fix it to the position between the male and female endings. Gender researcher Alyosxa Tudor came up with the wandering gap in response to the criticism the static gap began to garner as people took issue with the fact that the space was framed by the male and female ending, as if suggesting that those were the natural ends of the gender spectrum. The wandering gender gap isn’t relegated to sit between the norms, it can be inserted between any two letters of a word, making it slippery and chaotic, mostly annoying to read, rarely if ever used, and also my personal favorite of the German gender hacks. Too radical to be practical, I imagine the verbal version of the wandering gender gap to be riddled with glottal stops, sputtering out, breaking down language, turning mundane conversation into a kind of sound poetry.

Yet if the goal is widespread adoption (and that, too, is up for debate) something more subtle, shape-shifting, yet familiar, would better do the trick. It’s unclear exactly how the gender star came about, or who started using it first, but some sources date it to 2009. In 2015 the German Green Party started using the gender star, and in 2017 the Berliner Senat adopted it. When I learned about it, belatedly, upon my move to Berlin in 2019, it had just been adopted in the official language rules for the city of Hanover, prompting backlash from the Verein Deutsche Sprache (an association for the German language), which published an open letter signed by more than 70 public figures and a petition emphatically titled “No More Gender Nonsense!”

I was renting a small shared studio at the time within the offices of the German feminist magazine Missy Magazine, which had adopted the gender star and had just published a piece about the decision. The article explains that the gender star has its origin in computer science, where the asterisk is a “wildcard” symbol, and can stand in for any string of characters. “The gender star creates a form of address that includes cis and trans men and women and people who identify themselves as outside of the binary genders on an equal basis,” writes Naira Estevez, who was also tasked with looking after us renters. She adds: “We’ve chosen not to use an asterisk at Missy at the end of a word, even if the person we address is trans. Because a trans woman is a woman—not a woman*.” One of my studio mates at the time, Anja Neidhardt, a feminist design researcher and writer, noted in a 2018 piece she wrote for the magazine ROM that just as consistently as she uses the gender star in her writing, it’s edited out by design magazines. Her piece argues that designers have a unique opportunity not only to encourage the usage of gender-equitable language—“Design has the potential to reach many people, not least those who are not already sensitized to the topic during their studies and who read neither Missy Magazine nor the party proposals of the Greens,” she writes—but also to design a better symbol.

While Estevez calls the asterisk the most beautiful solution, Neidhardt notes (approvingly) that the stars are seen as “troublemakers who disturb the harmony of what we have internalized as beautiful and good and uncomplicated.” Being seen as disruptive is somewhat new for the asterisk, which comes from “astrum,” the Latin word for star, and stretches back to Hellenistic Alexandria when scholars needed a symbol to correct classic texts without changing them. Centuries later, asterisks were used to signal the omission of certain passages in the Greek translations of the Old Testament, which made it the symbol of something missing or hidden. It’s this connotation that makes the asterisk perfect for concealing a password, or gives meaning to scholar Saidiya Hartman’s description of a young Black woman’s life as “an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.” The asterisk is undoubtedly more beautiful when it’s used as an additive gesture, a sign of being seen, a citation, a collaboration across texts. It’s also quite beautiful in its radial form, which implies a certain non-linearity, all points leading back to the same center. Hannah Witte, who wrote her thesis Linguhacks / Typohacks on the topic, writes that the gender star symbolizes “a spectrum of many sexes, which in all directions shine.” The pause of the gender star may be so subtle in verbal speech that it’s possible to miss, but it’s hardly that in written language. A page of writing with asterisks in every sentence practically sparkles.

Still, even among friends who find the gender star beautiful in theory, who firmly believe in creating a more equitable German language, whose own speech is punctuated by pauses—designers who convince their clients to use gender-sensitive language, editors who argue for its use in editorial meetings—there’s a consensus that the star isn’t perfect. Where it succeeds in disrupting a norm it also succeeds in disrupting the flow and cadence of a text and the appearance of a layout. From a design point of view, the asterisk sits conspicuously above the x-height, creates white space in the middle of a word, affects grey levels. There’s a sense that, while the asterisk works for now, it’s more of a quick fix than a long term solution, and there’s hope that the latter is still to come. Ann Richter and Pia Christmann of Studio Pandan, who regularly deal with the gender star in their work as designers, but also as teachers, led a workshop at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design where they encouraged an examination of gender-neutral language/writing. Their search for improved typographic forms resulted in critical statements as posters. Both Witte and Neidhardt nod in their writings to designer Sarah Gephart’s “Hypothetical Hack,” a thought experiment in creating a glyph for a third gender pronoun. Gephart’s experimentation in developing a new symbol, and the rather lovely results, could provide a possible blueprint for a gender-equitable otherwise. Daniela Burger, design director at Missy, puts it more succinctly: the gender star is a transition period. “Our language will continue to develop, especially in this regard, and at some point new systems will emerge that no longer have typographical deficits. I think that designers, linguists, and others will increasingly deal with the problem and thus find new solutions.”

This view is echoed by Luise F. Pusch, the feminist linguist, though she’s also vocally not in favor of the gender star. Pusch notes that even with the star, women (in the form of the feminine ending) are still positioned as secondary, taking their place after men. She’s made a two phase plan for developing a gender-equitable German language: first, use the generic feminine as much as possible, “so that the language community gets used to the fact that there are women, too.” And second, “the genders (or their delegates) sit down at a table and, similarly to the parties of a collective bargaining process, work on a compromise: a language that is fair and comfortable for both—today its better to say: all—genders.” In the meantime, Pusch of course prefers the Binnen-I, but has also proposed a compromise with gender star users: an i in which the dot is an asterisk (“the icing on the cake”). Or, since keyboards don’t yet come with an iced i, an exclamation mark (Designer!n) ala the pop star P!nk. There’s also the x-form (Designx), proposed by Lann Hornscheidt, Professx for gender studies and language analysis, which echoes the English latinx and womxn, and represents Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersecting axes of discrimination experiences.

All rather beautiful typographic hacks, from where I sit, but there’s no denying that the gender star has taken off in a way that the other German gender hacks haven’t. This is for several reasons, the biggest of which is likely that we are farther along as a society (and Germany as a country) in accepting an expanded view of gender and equitability, and encouraging language to reflect that. But I’d also like to suggest that it’s because the asterisk is a perfect stand-in for bigger and broader change. As a gender star, the asterisk acts as a kind of joint, between endings and among genders. Though “hack” may sound like something’s breaking, the asterisk in this sense is a tool for mending, or at least for tenuously holding things together until something better arises.

In general, too, the asterisk’s nimbleness to change, having occupied so many different positions over time, make it an ideal symbol for the malleability of language itself. Language not only describes, but also shapes, reality. It holds our thoughts, structures our ways of knowing, defines the boundaries of our perceptions. How botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer describes sweetgrass I would also attribute to the asterisk in regards to language: “It thrives on disturbed edges.” In its most common usage, as an indicator of footnotes, the asterisk has long represented what’s been relegated to the margins, literally and figuratively—that which doesn’t make it into the official narrative. It’s fitting that as the gender star, the asterisk not only represents those previously omitted, but is also writing them back in.

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“ S e c t e ”  :  A n    I n c l u s i v e    V o w e l    f o r    S p a n i s h

    Originally published in Spanish by El Heraldo de México in October 2021 | Translated and adapted in January 2023

Heteronormative times call for deconstructive measures. One of these measures has been the use of inclusive language, which has been the source of great controversy with even the Royal Spanish Academy refusing to acknowledge the evolution of language—an evolution required in these times that necessitate more and more openness for all genders.

In an attempt to solve this dilemma of gender and inclusion in the Spanish language, where masculine terms predominate, two artists have created a new vowel. Artist Mario García Torres, originally from Coahuila, and typographer Aldo Arillo, from Monterrey, began working on the letter’s design at the beginning of 2021. The vowel they created, called “secte,” tries to solve the problem of gendered language in Spanish. A conjunction of “a,” “e,” and “o,” it represents a new letter that has no gender—a sixth (sexta) vowel.

Torres initiated this project as part of the exhibition “La poética del regreso” (“The Poetics of the Return”) at the MARCO museum (El museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey), which reopened its doors on March 13, 2022. The exhibition included a sculpture representing the new vowel. This was without a doubt a highly anticipated opening in Monterrey after the Ministry of Health permitted the reopening of museums in the city.

To create the new letter “secte,” the artists had to rely on different characteristics such as legibility, harmony, and rhythm—things that have been lacking in other attempts at inclusive characters like the “X” and the @ sign.

Currently, this letter is only available in the font Neo Leon by Arillo. It can be requested by email to the typographer at aldoarillo@gmail.com.

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H y p o t h e t i c a l    H a c k

    by Sarah Gephart | Originally published by MGMT Design

In the fall of 2016, Apple released the iOS10 update, which introduced—among other necessary things like invisible ink—the Emoji replacement and emoji prediction functions. So that as you type along in your message window, emoji’s are automatically suggested to finish your sentence.

In March of 2017, the website Mashable noted that even if the text clearly used a female pronoun such as, “she’s the CFO,” the suggested emoji would be a male icon. After reading the article in the fall of 2017 as I was researching this project, I tested the predictive function on my phone and found the same gender biased results. Then, a few weeks later after an upgrade, the problem was fixed and I was given two options when I texted my friend Alicia.

It still perpetuates a gender binary, but was at least a step in the right direction. It is indicative, however, of gender biases in the highly male-dominated tech world. Much has been written about bias lately in regards to how it shows up in machine learning and AI. It struck me as relevant in light of our project—while tools for communication, from the quill, to letterpress, typewriter, and telephone, can be seen as typically gendered, the biases inherent in the production reflect the prevalent gender roles in society over time. What I find unsettling is that biases in communication today are almost more damaging than they were in the past because gender-biased decisions are happening in hidden algorithms, programming, and machine learning.

The reasons for the implicitly predictive male CEO image could have been due to patterns in the writers' own messaging, or because the code number for a man's face is lower than the number for a woman's, or because the designer who originated the code simply thought of CEOs as naturally male, or thought that a male figure could represent a neutral figure much as how "he" has been used as a universal pronoun for decades. As users of this communication technology, we are left completely in the dark about the mechanisms dictating the design and need to be constantly vigilant to detect them. As designers, though, we have the power to consider how machine learning, pattern recognition, and predictive programming can be used to introduce positive change.

My project is a hypothetical hack that proposes to utilize the ability of technology to force change overnight and with that the potential of typography to precede spoken language in forming new words. As a place to start, I thought I'd focus on the idea of designing a gender neutral pronoun glyph.

As I muddled through the project, a few models came to light.

    1. The Ampersand

Its form is derived from the Latin "et" for "and," but its name actually came after the initial use of the glyph itself. Probably first introduced by a harried Roman scribe, creating a ligature of e and t, it was further developed and established during the Renaissance, when the e/t ligature remained despite the transformation of "and" into different languages. It has three different forms—the Roman, the Italic, and lowercase, where you can see its origins more clearly.

The glyph's usage was so common that at one point it was considered the 27th letter of the alphabet. British school children reciting the letters would end with, "... X, Y, Z, and per se and." Since "per se" means "by or of itself," what the students meant was "... X, Y, Z, and, by itself, and." Over time, the phrase "and per se and" was mixed into a single word: ampersand. While the glyph lost out on inclusion in the alphabet, the form remains, with lots of variation as it is drawn into different fonts.

    2. Ms.

The history of the honorifics Miss, Mrs., and Ms. are rather muddled: In the past, Mrs. was used as a term of respect or to indicate social rank regardless of marital status, while Ms. served as an abbreviation for Mistress and for Miss. Over time, the terms Mrs. and Miss became more codified to designate marital status. In a 2009 essay from The New York Times column "On Language," Ben Zimmer traced the history of using the term Ms. to refer to women whose marital status is unknown to a 1901 edition of The Sunday Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts. Here, an unnamed writer stated, "There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill. Everyone has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some woman. To call a maiden Mrs. is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss. Yet it is not always easy to know the facts."

The text goes on to suggest "a more comprehensive term which does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation, namely, Ms." With this simple and easy-to-write title, a tactfully ambiguous compromise between Miss and Mrs., the person concerned can translate it properly according to circumstances.

The writer even gave a pronunciation tip: "For oral use it might be rendered as 'Mizz,' which would be a close parallel to the practice long universal in many bucolic regions, where a slurred Mis' does duty for Miss and Mrs. alike."

The suggestion was largely ignored for decades, and Ms. existed as a little-used option in business etiquette books. In the 1960s and '70s, however, the term was rediscovered and promoted as a politicized option for feminists who rejected both Mrs. and Miss. As it gained power as a symbol of the feminist movement, it was chosen as the title of Gloria Steinem's influential magazine. The pronunciation was still in question, though; at the time the magazine was introduced in 1971, both the "miss" and "mizz" pronunciations were considered acceptable, with "mizz" eventually winning out in common usage.

    3. Ƭ̵̬̊

And then there is Prince's unpronounceable hybrid male/female symbol that he introduced in 1993 as his new name. It was invented as part artistic gesture of rebirth and also as a savvy buisness strategy to try to break out of a contract with Warner Bros. The symbol made a media commotion. Besides creating a linguistic challenge, there was the problem of how to distribute the new icon. In this pre-internet world, media outlets were sent floppy disks with a file containing a font for the glyph.

While he may not have been able to get out of the contract, in many ways, the move was greatly successful, promoting The Artist Formerly Known as Prince's reptutation as a gender-bending avant-garde performer. The symbol itself came to be called the Love Symbol.

    4. The Apple Glitch

My final example is actually an Apple iOS error. This past fall, I, along with millions of other OS10 and 11 Apple users, experienced a bug on our phones where when I typed "I" it was auto-replaced by the letter "A" and an unpronounceable unicode character. The bug was related to Apple's cloud-based synchronization for predictive text—a relatively recent feature that allows users' dictionaries to be shared using its iCloud service. When the phone learns a novel autocorrection, such as the name of a new contact, it will be shared with other devices owned by the same person. So for some reason, our phones decided that "A#" was better than "I."

Semiotically, i doesn't have to look like i for people to understand what you mean. The key in this case was ensuring that enough people using and recognizing the new symbol gave it the same meaning as "I." As hundreds of millions of people who use iPhones experienced the glitch together, it began to enforce a new letter in the alphabet. Once we collectively decided we didn't need i, we adapted and moved on. Our machines dictated a new language for us, and we ran with it.

So if you add up the four examples, my project seems obvious: Design a gender-neutral pronoun glyph, hack into Apple, and insert a program so that every time someone writes he or she, the program autocorrects to the symbol. Easy.

For the purposes of the project, I stuck to the first step.

I started by drawing possibilities for the form. Introducing a gender-neutral pronoun is tricky territory. In the most simple case it replaces the ackward phrasing "he or she," the written "s/he," and the often grammatically ambiguous "they."

I thought that if the form was somewhat legible as a combination of "s/he" or "he/she," it would be more familiar and easier for people to adopt, similar to the e/t ligature in the ampersand. The evocative nature of blending two letters also seems appropriate to the task. Like the ampersand, too, I thought it should be something that flows from handwriting.

The trickier aspect of a pronoun replacement is its use in the genderfluid community. While the symbol might superficially fix the binary problem, is it possible for a static glpyh to represent change at any moment? Or can a single symbol represent infinite individuality?

Using Ms. as a model, I'm not proposing a pronunciation for the glyph, thinking ypothetically that pronunciation could develop organically over time, allowing different communities to determine their own word for the symbol, hopefully coalescing into a universally accepted term.

I worked further on the shape of the glyph so that, along with he and she, possible genderfluid pronoun options like ne, ve, e, ze, or they, to name a few, could be seen as equally evident in the form. Think of Prince's Love Symbol as a model, perhaps the form could represent a full range of gender possiblities beyond the neutral.

The next step is to choose one of the glyphs, program it into the next iOS update so that as you type "he" or "she," the symbol automatically replaces the words. Unlike the glitch, I'm wondering if you should be able to override it, or if the symbol replaces she and he completely, thus forcing English to become a more gender-neutral language like Finnish, to name one, where the word "hän" means both he and she.

Over time, perhaps the symbol could be adopted into the keypad like the ampersand, and like the ampersand, drawn into different fonts.

Perhaps with this combination of tech and typography, where form can precede spoken language and where programs can override our conventions or change depending on context or connectivity, we can someday achieve something both universal and unique.

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