Resumen de 5 - Unseen Gender: Misgendering of Transgender Individuals in Czech
The focus of this chapter is the possible dehumanization or infra-humanization of transgender individuals through grammatical means in the Czech language. This language is rich in these features and uses a grammatical gender for persons (not based on the sex of a subject), as opposed to some, more commonly studied, languages (like English) that mark gender exclusively in pronouns. The research questions concern whether there is any misgendering by morphosyntactic means, and if so, how it is constructed, but also how misgendering is constructed, if not by morphosyntactic means. The material consists of four corpora, one in-group, one out-group, one with news texts and one with online posts of different kinds. To detect cases of misgendering in our corpora the authors look at morphosyntactic alignment within the same clauses as well as in a wider context. The result shows that the neuter pronoun ‘it’, or other neuter misgenderings, are rarely used for trans persons in Czech. Misgendering is constructed mainly by subject–predicate disagreement, but also by predicative nouns such as ‘trans men are women’. When looking for insulting expressions in Czech, the search strategy might thus require complementary parameters compared to e.g. English, enhancing the search for specific morphosyntactic features.
