alt Hacker NewsI'd like to know too. I struggled to understand the description of the extension - is it an anti-woke thing, or some sort of modern approach to German removing the traditional (i.e. non-political) genderisation of some words, or both, or something else?
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A bit of both? Imagine every time you read the word "actor", it is instead spelled something like "actor:ress", or "actor_ress", or "actor*ress" (because the separator hasn't been standardised).
Personally I'm in favour of it, but I will concede that if it's done enough times throughout the text (as German has way more gendered nouns in common use than English) it does come with the downside of breaking the reading flow.
The first. In German, many words that refer to a person (e.g. Fahrer/Fahrerin, male/female driver) have a plural which is identical to the male singular. For a while now, many writers have used a typographic style to make the plural gender-neutral by writing the male plural, an asterisk, and then the female plural suffix (e.g. Fahrer*innen).
Example: Reader
In German: Leser (masculine)
Possible forms of inclusive speech: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen
This extension removes these possible forms of inclusive speech. Arguably they hurt the reading flow and the German language has the generic masculine. However, proponents of inclusive speech feel that the generic masculine isn't inclusive.