How did the sign come into the language?

The gender star should go, goodbye and goodbye. In any case, a non-partisan committee in the city of Zurich no longer wants to encounter the typographical symbol in the future: the group recently launched a popular initiative to “liberate” the city from the star.

It can be assumed that the five-pointer took the Zurich team hostage last summer at the latest. Because when the city council passed new regulations on linguistic equality in June, it decided to use the gender star in official texts from now on. The initiators want to take action against this, and the collection of signatures is ongoing. The asterisk will definitely end up in the ballot box one day. But where did the heavenly thing actually come from?

From Mesopotamia, some say. Indeed, among the pictographic signs used by the Sumerians 5,000 years ago, there is a star that resembles depictions today. In the context of an alphabetical script, however, the star only appeared much later, in the 2nd century BC. When the chief librarian in Alexandria was editing a copy of the “Iliad,” he marked passages in the text that he thought were misplaced with an asterisk. This «asterískos», the ancient Greek name for a small star, became established as an editorial symbol, together with the «obelískos», a small cross that the text editors placed next to fundamentally dubious passages.

Every child today knows «asterískos» and «obelískos» as a couple, but beyond the world of comics, Asterisk alone has had an important career. In the Middle Ages, its functions expanded. He continued to signal inconsistencies in manuscripts, but he increasingly pointed out additional texts in the margins as an early footnote symbol.

Sometimes the asterisk could also mark omissions and thus stand in the place of whole words or individual letters that one did not want to write down for some reason. In general, the asterisk was used almost everywhere in the early modern period: the Zurich mathematician Johann Heinrich Rahn introduced it to the world of numbers in 1659 as a multiplication sign.

The possibilities behind the t

No wonder, centuries later, the Asterisk was also used in the computer environment. In the first programming language, which emerged in the 1950s, the asterisk functioned as a multiplication operator, and it still serves as a wildcard in many programs today. The *, what that means in concrete terms, stands for any number and sequence of characters, you know that from some search engines: If you type in “Ster*” and press Enter, you not only get the “star”, but also the “stereo system » or the «death companion» as results.

From this very IT cosmos, the asterisk has found its way into our language today. When exactly the sign first appeared around gender issues cannot be reconstructed. What is certain, however, is that it happened at a time when transsexual networks were developing alongside computer networks. In these circles, the spelling t* was probably used in English-speaking countries as early as the 1980s: as a signal for the many possibilities that open up behind “trans”.

Up until then, people had mostly spoken of “transsexuality” and used it to describe the physically completed change from one gender to the other. Words like “transgender” or “transidentity” now also included people who did not want to commit themselves to any gender or who did not want to have an operation sought and advocated a variety of options accordingly. In the mid-1990s, these thoughts, and with them the asterisks, arrived in the German-speaking world. The spelling “Trans * people” was “very popular” at the time, the co-founder of a German trans association notes in a book from 2002.

However, the popularity seems to have been limited to a narrow circle. Even within the trans community, the asterisk was not yet in common use at the beginning of the noughties, and another sign was initially established here. In 2003, Steffen Kitty Herrmann, who was active in the queer scene in Berlin at the time and is now a philosophy lecturer at the Fernuniversität Hagen, wrote that the gap, the underscore, could be suitable for breaking up the two-gender order of the German language: in spellings like “Leser_in”, so the thought would arise, space for other, previously denied and invisible sexualities. When asked on the phone, Herrmann says he didn’t know about the Asterisk back then.

Delete or call?

Herrmann expressly emphasizes that he wrote the text on the gap to show possibilities, not to make demands. “The motto was not: ‘We all have to speak like this now’, but: ‘We can speak like this!'”

He never expected the effect that the idea would have: The underscore, which “had emerged from the middle of an activist movement”, was widely taken up within a few years, by other activists as well as by people who showed solidarity with the community wanted to show. Since the subculture from which the sign came partly overlapped with university milieus, the underscore quickly came into use at universities, and as Herrmann recalls, it was soon to be found in the first official language guides.

Compared to the line, the star led a shadowy existence at the beginning of the millennium. What the sign was able to say was also still open. In a Viennese gender discussion group, for example, they experimented with the asterisk to “degender” words. Instead of invoking multiple identities, the sign here should erase all references to male, female, or otherwise: “*Les*” would have stood for “the reader”, “the reader” or a person reading, according to this logic.

The author of a corresponding specialist article considered the star in 2008 to be one of the “most exciting” variants for questioning the “two-gender social system” and prophesied further imaginative creations: “The * is by no means fully thought out, but it is in constant development and creative use .»

But that never happened: A little more than ten years ago, the use of the star quickly became established. At the Center for Translation Studies in Vienna, the symbol was mentioned in 2009 in a “Guide to Gender-Equitable Use of Language” – as far as is known, this is the first time the asterisk has appeared in such a document. The asterisk was used here as an alternative to the “gender gap”. Just like this one, it was said, the asterisk “makes sexes visible that were previously made invisible.”

The placeholder idea, on which the first trans* spellings were based, thus prevailed, in a roundabout way, but now unstoppably: In the entire German-speaking area, universities and institutions began to integrate the asterisk in language guides in the 2010s. The University of Zurich, for example, adopted the sign in 2018, and in 2022 the Zurich City Council followed several other cities that had pioneered the use of the asterisk since around 2015.

The language is broken!

The fact that activists’ playful concepts ultimately lead to institutionalization may seem contradictory. But the new signs fit into the existing ones, because language guidelines and regulations had long been a tradition when the asterisk began to rise – gender-equitable language has been a struggle for almost fifty years, especially in authorities and schools.

Beginning in the 1970s, feminist linguistics developed various concepts to avoid the generic masculine, women should no longer only be “included” in grammatically masculine words like “the readers”. The consistent naming of men and women, the inner I, slashes or parentheses solutions were discussed, introduced in some media and anchored in leaflets against sexist language use, which were already circulating at universities in the 1980s.

Even then, the efforts led to conflicts, in Switzerland sometimes also to elections. In Wädenswil, a vote was taken on a revised municipal code in 1993, which used exclusively female forms for personal designations – it met with no mercy from the voters, instead a constitutional text with double designations, i.e. with male and female forms, was adopted in 1994.

Of course, this variant did not suit everyone. Such writings, it was said in the municipal council, were “no longer understandable and no longer readable”, yes, they directly “destroyed the German language”. Others, on the other hand, insisted that women who had been oppressed for a long time should finally be given visibility.

Thirty years later, nothing has changed in the arguments, only the subject is different today. In progressive circles it is now considered obsolete to promote “equal treatment of men and women”, as the old language guides aimed to, or to make the language “fair for both sexes”, as linguistic introductory books still wrote in the year 2000 .

Over time, the “understanding of the term and content ‘gender’ has expanded,” wrote the city of Zurich in 2022, which means in plain language: thinking in two genders is yesterday, and visibility is no longer due to women in relation to men provide, but the “non-binary persons” over all others. Consequently, the Binnen-I (“Zürcherinnen”) is no longer used under the new regulations.

Understandable only to the initiated

The feminists have been outstripped by new groups with new signs, little fortunate among the older guard. Luise F. Pusch, for example, doyenne of feminist linguistics, complained in 2016 that women gain nothing from asterisks or underscores – on the contrary: once again, as a mere word appendage, as a derived form, they would end up “on the sidelines”.

Other linguists also point out that there is no scientific evidence for the effect of the asterisk: Whether readers think of a non-binary person when they encounter “a reader” in a text is not known. Initial studies seem to contradict this. In a study from 2019, even in the academic segment, only 50 percent of the test persons knew what the asterisk actually stood for.

In other words, the sign is not self-explanatory for the language users. Only those who are familiar with the accompanying discourse surrounding the asterisk can interpret the image of the celestial body as the activists originally intended. It is astonishing that such an unclear sign conquered the entire German-speaking world – and ultimately it was perhaps only logical. It is possible that the lack of focus is also the reason for the symbol’s success: it is enough to garnish your own words with an asterisk to shine with a somehow progressive attitude.