Recently elected Argentine President Javier Milei’s government has banned the use of “inclusive language” and references to “the gender issue” in public documents, institutions, and processes. Argentina’s Ministry of Defense immediately applied the ban “with the aim of avoiding misinterpretations in its transmissions.”
Milei, a self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” affiliated with the Libertarian Party, opposes feminist policies and abortion, which Argentina legalized in recent years. He also rejects the notion humans have a role in causing climate change. In a television appearance, he denounced Pope Francis, who is Argentine, as an “imbecile” for defending social justice and called the head of the Roman Catholic Church “the representative of malignance on Earth,” according to the Associated Press. The move requires public institutions to follow the rules of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) so as not to fall into a “deviation or denaturation of non-standardized Spanish nor endorsed by a corresponding legal plexus,” so “the correct use of the Spanish language is imposed, which are the guidelines that have been used for the framing and guidance of all regulations, manuals and writing and symbology documents of the army.”
In the resolution signed by Minister of Defense Luis Petri, the Argentine government includes that anyone who fails to comply with the given guidelines “will be liable to incur responsibility in their respective areas,” meaning they will be penalized.
“The objective is to eliminate incorrect forms of language that can generate an erroneous interpretation of what is desired, affecting the execution of orders and the development of military operations,” wrote the Argentine Ministry of Defense in the same post.
In this way, the use of terms that contain the letter “x” or incorrect uses of the letter “e” or “a” to signify gender will be prohibited. “Soldadxs” or “soldades,” “sargentxs” or “sargentes” and “generalxs” or “generalas” are some examples.
Shortly after the Ministry of Defense made its announcement, the spokesman for the Argentine president, Manuel Adorni, added that the same measure will be adopted in all Argentine public institutions.
In addition to the use of language, as stipulated by the Royal Spanish Academy, references to the “gender issue” are also prohibited in public institutions. “The Castilian language [Spanish] contemplates all sectors, I do not see the need for the new structure. It is a debate in which we are not going to participate because we consider that the gender issue has also been used as a political business, that is not a matter of discussion,” clarified the spokesman, according to Argentine outlet Clarín. Meanwhile, Spain’s Congress has drafted a new version of its Rules of Procedure written in “inclusive” language, a text in which generic masculine forms have been eliminated by combining genders, such as ‘diputados y diputadas’ into inclusive term like “members of the House” and using other neutral terms, like presidencia (presidency), in place of the current el presidente.
