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It is possible to talk about grammatical (or ungrammatical) neuter gender in basic education, as long as teachers know linguistic and grammatical theories

I'm not saying that gender neutrality shouldn't be discussed in the classroom. It's just that there are many, many mistakes made both by those who are against discussing the subject in the classroom and by those who are in favor.

On both sides I see animosity and no reliable epistemological basis, starting with the fact that they do not base the discussion on the concepts of linguistic variation and change, which are somewhat different: cinematograph, for example, is a word that no one uses: everyone uses cinema. This also applies to the nouns pneumático and pneu. When one variant definitively takes the place of another, the variation is more than variation: it is change. The forms foto and fotografia coexist with each other in the same historical time.

Furthermore, we need to distinguish sexual gender from gender identity. As I understand it, there are two sexes (or genders), and they are necessarily biological, but at least three hundred gender identities have been catalogued. If a person, shortly after birth (or childbirth), was classified as female by the obstetrician, but, in adolescence, began to identify with the male gender (i.e.: began to declare himself to be a man) due to gender dysphoria, I respect the gender identity and address the person by the male name that the person chose, especially if the person is a student in my classroom.

As for those who declare themselves non-binary, I can accept the treatment they expect through the use of “grammatically” neutral pronouns, but I have to make it clear that: (i) the neutral grammatical gender of “elu”, for example, would create an oxytone neologism, which is absurd, because the word would have to be paroxytone, which would require a spelling regression, with a circumflex accent over the letter “e” (elu), and this could be confusing at the literacy stage (I believe).

(ii) The word carro, whose “o” is a thematic vowel and not a gender ending, is always in the masculine form, so that the masculine form ends up being neuter for obvious reasons, and this reasoning applies to the word cadeira. (iii) The neuter gender was used in the time of the Roman Empire, and was given to slaves and objects because both these and those were placed in the category of what was not human, which shows that slaves were wronged to the extent that their humanity was not even recognized by the legal system of that time, when Latin was spoken, a language in which there was the neuter gender to distinguish men and women from slaves; therefore, returning to the use of the neuter gender would not be progress, nor evolution for the language, but rather a setback.

(iv) The word child is always feminine, but can refer to any boy, whereas the word individual, which is always masculine, can refer to a woman (whether cis or trans).

Conclusion

It is possible to talk about grammatical (or ungrammatical) neutral gender in basic education, as long as teachers know linguistic and grammatical theories, to which they need to add what is known about sexual orientation, gender (or biological sex) and gender identity, three different concepts (from what I understand).

Language teachers who bring up the subject would have to make it clear that it is impossible to standardize the grammatical (or ungrammatical) neuter gender, both from the point of view of the formal standard and from the point of view of the most popular models of language use in various spheres of human activity and in various texts, whether spoken or written.

Therefore, language teachers would have to inform students that the neutral gender would be an example of linguistic variation, but first, they would have to check whether students already have the minimum requirements to understand this, that is: they would have to check whether they have already learned the diachronic (historical), diatopic (geographical), diaphasic (situational) and diastratic (social class, age and profession) variations; they would also have to check whether students know the levels of register or style (formal and informal).

Once these conditions are consolidated, the competent teacher would show that the neuter gender would be at an intersection between the diaphasic and diastratic variations. The use of the neuter gender, present in the pronoun “todes”, is to the taste of a social group. If we compare this group to fighting game enthusiasts, who use the word apelão when they lose to their opponent, the student will understand that this is a linguistic variation.

However, it cannot become the norm, because, as Evanildo Bechara has already stated, language is like a building. In order for it to become a formal norm, those who advocate the institutional and social adoption of the neutral gender would have to create a new language in a laboratory, like Esperanto. The right and the far right want nothing to do with this: they want to hunt witches; while the left and the far left promote cancel culture, which is also a witch hunt. I am between a rock and a hard place.

*Marcio Alessandro de Oliveira He has a master's degree in Literary Studies from UERJ and is a teacher in the Espírito Santo state network..

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