A friend of mine, Cait, emailed me a few nights ago to initiate a discussion about languages where nouns are gendered. To explain as quickly as possible: English, as a language, is relatively neuter. Nouns tend not to have inherent gender attached to them. There are some, of course—boy and girl are not interchangeable—but in general, table and bed and cat and glove are neuter. In many other languages, those words are gendered (I’ll mostly rely on French and Spanish here): la mesa / la table; la cama / le lit; el gato / le chat; el guante / le gant.

Right.

Cait’s question is this (paraphrased/rephrased): In languages like Spanish, where gender is embedded in every noun and every adjective, is the gender something people think about, or is it just a part of life? I mean the significance of gendered language, especially in cases where gender isn’t clear-cut. Secondarily, how do queers in Spanish interact with the gendered language? Under some circumstances, where one would want to be ambiguous about one’s partner, how does one handle that in Spanish? In English, you can say, “I went out with someone last night,” or “I was really in love with my ex,” and it’s gender-neutral. But you can’t do that in Spanish—you have to pick a side. How do queers handle that?

(She had just watched the film XXY, which is where some of the questions originated for her. I haven’t seen it, so I have no more to say specifically.)

I responded to her email, and I’ll rephrase what I said to her below.

In essence, I think because of the gendered nature of the language, gay men tend to use a lot more feminizing language in Spanish. (I don’t actually think I’ve met any natively-Spanish lesbians, although it may be true for them as well.) I guess gay men do this in English, too—girl, she, queen, etc. Between each other, Spanish gay men do sometimes mix up the feminine and masculine forms intentionally. But I’ve read, and I can definitely believe this, that to native speakers of gendered languages, the gender just seems natural and implicit.

There’s an article I read a while back in the New York Times about, generally, linguistics, but more explicitly about how differences in language may (or may not) affect the way we think. Here’s a relevant quote:

Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

…

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love.

On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed. (Deutscher)

That is to say, I think people pretty much never think about gender when it comes to their nouns. I mean, I once asked someone about the variety of feminine and masculine forms for referring to the genitalia, and whether they thought it was weird, and I essentially got the answer of “No.” (To be fair, there are probably some people who do think this is strange. I don’t know.)

Here’s another relevant quote from that article:

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so. (Deutscher)

This is sort of the best article ever.

As to the question of ambiguity, I think that one could handle this in two ways.

a. An individual who wishes to wholly obscure his/her actions/desires has to lie from the outset. In English, Paloma might say “I was hanging out with my significant other last night,” but in Spanish she couldn’t. She’d could say, instead, “Salí con mi novio anoche” if she wanted to avoid expressing that she has a girlfriend.

b. On the other hand, there are one-gendered words. There are also ways of avoiding genders in speech. A friend told me once that he had discussed his boyfriend with his flatmates for a while without ever mentioning that the boyfriend was, in fact, male—presumably by saying things like, “La persona con quien estoy saliendo,” or referring to his “friend,” without specifically suggesting romantic leanings. I never got why he didn’t just come out with it, since he wasn’t closeted. I think he, at least, enjoyed the game—but he grew up bilingual. One could also just go about using the word “amante” (lover), which is masculine and feminine both. (“Mi amante,” my lover, would be gender-neutral, but when the word still does takes a gendered article—el amante, la amante. This doesn’t apply in French, at least not this way.)

Of course, one can sometimes say “their” as an ambiguous pronoun in romance languages: “ellos” can contain men and women; “su” (“their”)(“leur” in French) is gender-neutral as well.

But I’ve never watched the dancing around a topic happen. I reason that there’s probably a lot more secrets/lying in young queers in Spanish than in English, but then again young not-out queers tend to be secretive in any language, I would guess.