TransAzioni linguistiche: le lingue e il genere negato

The study of non-binary gender individuals has become a recurring and very fashionable topic within sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and critical discourse analysis. Despite the different methodological approaches, all studies seem to aptly underline the importance of two key-concepts: ideology and negotiation practices. Scholars acknowledge that concepts such as sexuality and gender are, indeed, largely informed by the crucial interrelation of power and ideology. Many transgender and gender variant people face problems in daily life because of the lack of negotiation practices and subsequent human rights recognition via European legal procedures. Trans people’s legal documents, for instance, do not reflect their true ‘self’ and this is still today a repeated source of ‘authorised’ harassment based on ideology. However, gender recognition goes beyond being an administrative act: it is vital for many trans people to be able to participate in society and live a life of dignity and respect. This paper, aiming to support trans rights from a translational view point, presents the analysis of a wide multilingual corpus which comprises a series of EU legal recommendations (in several European languages) adopted by the European Parliament to fully endorse gender equality and to undertake the creation of guidelines for gender-neutral language in each of its official languages. Despite the EU’s incredible efforts, the corpus shows that in some European languages, ideology and the total lack of common linguistic practices to be adopted by translators, transgender and gender variant people’s human rights are still in danger.