# FR: Attributing opposite gender pronouns / titles to people



## demoiselleromantique

Hi,

Over the past few years that I've been studying french, this practice has always greatly puzzled me. It seems really confusing to me, as a native english-speaker, that one would refer to a woman as "il" or a title like "le ministre" or a man as "elle". This has been particularly difficult for me to understand in certain contexts where one would think the sex of the person would be particularly significant (ex. romantic/sexual context, etc). I mean, _wouldn't you think of a man as being inherently male and a woman as being inherently female no matter what character they assumed?_

For example, in the fairytale "La belle et la bête", the Beast is always referred to as _la_ bête and even stranger, "_elle_" (with all the corresponding adjectives with feminine agreement)! Yet Belle eventually falls in love with him (or should I say with _her_) and marries him in the end. Surely she must have been well aware of _his_ gender??


I observed something similar in a french song I once heard. A man was singing of his love for a woman, but he was referring to her as "un ange" and therefore as "il" and "lui". I mean this was obviously a woman he was talking about, and it was clearly a romantic/sexual context. Of all contexts, in this one especially wouldn't it be make sense therefore that he would be aware and think/speak of her as _female_?


I know there are countless other instances where men and women are referred to by opposite gender nouns/pronouns. Another example that comes to my mind is when a man is referred to as "une personne" with all the accompanying feminine pronouns and adjective agreements. 


Finally, many professional titles are masculine, such as "le ministre" and "le médecin" even when they are held by women. This makes absolutely no sense to me either. I am aware that there are certain "discours" on this subject even in France about whether this practice is sexist. But how do the majority of french-speakers think when they encounter women holding such titles and referred to in the masculine form? Doesn't it seems strange to them to refer to their female doctor as "le médecin" or "il"?


Maybe this is more of a cultural question and I am aware that it might sound a bit silly to native french speakers since they are used to it, but please try to understand how strange it seems to me as a native english speaker and help to clear my confusion.

*Moderator note:* Multiple threads have been merged to create this one.


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## Keith Bradford

I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but it's a subject which interests me too, having interpreted in a conference where the curly-headed speaker was introduced as: _"Une personne qui est très connue.  Elle a édité le magazine Xxxxx... Elle tient le poste de..."_  High in my glass booth I dutifully translated _"She... she..."._  And then the guy lifted his head! (Hint for interpreters: translate _une personne... elle..._ as "somebody... somebody...").

The only way I can explain this to myself is that we're dealing with words, not reality.  It's not whether a person is male or female, but whether the word _personne_ is masculine or feminine. And since the earliest days, Latin expressed the same phenomenon - _nauta_ and _poeta_ were feminine words, though the sailor and the poet were men. 

You confuse yourself by using the words _male_ and _female_ - it's _*masculine*_ and _*feminine*_ and these are language terms, like _verb_ and _pronoun_. Take it to be a linguistic habit, and forget about sex. (Forget sex?  What am I saying?!?!)


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## doodlebugger

Wouldn't you say in English: _she is a man-of-war_?
I could argue it does not make much more sense!


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## Keith Bradford

It's interesting to see how French translators get round the problem. Towards the end of Romeo and Juliet, Capulet says "_Death is my son-in-law_". Now of course _la Mort_ is feminine, so what's a translator to do?  François Victor-Hugo wrote "_le sépulcre est mon gendre_" but the better solution was (I forget whose) "_l'Ange de la Mort est mon gendre_".

Of course, in Terry Pratchett's discworld novels, Death is an elderly skeleton, and the brilliant translator Patrick Couton simply puts in a footnote saying essentially: "_On this planet Death is masculine; live with it_".


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## demoiselleromantique

I'm not too familiar with nautical terms, but I think in this case "she" refers to a ship and a "man-of-war" is a type of ship. A ship is an object, a non-living thing, not a person. Most of the time in English, when referring to objects (and most animals) we use the neutral pronoun "it", but ships are one of those rare special cases like "motherland", "mother earth", etc., where we use the feminine pronoun. Of course in french, all nouns, whether objects, animals, or people have gender. 

What I am curious about in french is how people are referred to with feminine and masculine pronoun/nouns when they are of the opposite sex. I want to understand the thinking/psychology behind this language usage.


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## Keith Bradford

Like I said, Demoiselle, it's not sex, it's grammatical gender. Live with it.

(But in any case I could write you a whole essay about how even people, let alone the words that describe them, can be masculine on one criterion and feminine on another. A woman can have a 'masculine' brain, a man can have 'feminine' breasts. Anybody can wear the clothes they choose. These categories are not so rigid as you think.)


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## lucas-sp

"All people are inherently male or female aren't they?"

You'd better not let Judith Butler hear you talking that way.


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## timpeac

*Moderator note:* The below discussion was split from this thread.



Keith Bradford said:


> The difficulty, as Nunty says in #5, is remembering.  I once had a very red face when interpreting: "_Maintenant je présente une personne que vous connaissez bien.  Elle était rédactrice en chef du journal X et ensuite elle a été mutée vers.._." and so on.  I'd said "she" about six times before the curly-headed _personne_ raised *his* head.


But wouldn't they have just assumed you were agreeing with "une personne"? (although I agree it does get odd when you are speaking at such length about a man).


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## CapnPrep

There is agreement, and there is agreement. If you know that the person is male, you cannot say _Cette personne était *rédactrice* en chef du journal X_. 

It is quite difficult to avoid revealing a person's sex in French, even more so than in English. In a normal conversation, the sex of the person is established quite quickly, within one or two sentences, and from then on (barring further grammatical bizarreness, such as _Sa Sainteté_) the pronouns follow natural gender, just as in English. You cannot continuing using _elle_ throughout the whole conversation simply because you started off with _une personne_, unless you are intentionally concealing information (and this will be very obvious, and unnatural).

[…]http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1432207


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## Nunty

CapnPrep said:


> There is agreement, and there is agreement. If you know that the person is male, you cannot say _Cette personne était *rédactrice* en chef du journal X_.



OK, but can it work like this?
_Qui est cette personne ?
Il est rédacteur en chef.

_


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## Maître Capello

Technically, it could, but no native would answer that question this way as we would indeed use _C'est le_ instead of _Il est _or _Elle est_ in this case (see the numerous threads discussing _c'est / il est_).


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## timpeac

Scanning through those titles I can only see "c'est" if it's modified. Are you saying you would say "c'est rédacteur en chef", which sounds odd to me - or do you mean it should be "c'est le rédacteur en chef" ?


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## Nunty

So it would work like this?
_-Qui est cette personne?
-Cette personne-ci? C'est *le*(?) rédacteur en chef..._


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## Maître Capello

timpeac said:


> do you mean it should be "c'est le rédacteur en chef" ?


Yes, with the definite article. Sorry for the confusion… (I've edited my previous post.)


Nunty said:


> So it would work like this?
> _-Qui est cette personne?
> -Cette personne-ci? C'est *le*_ (?)_ rédacteur en chef..._


That's it.


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