The president of the Austrian Parliament has banned the use of so-called “gender-inclusive” language in official communications of the legislative body.
Walter Rosenkranz, president of the Nationalrat (National Council, Austria’s Lower House of Parliament), recently announced that Parliament will go back to using the generic masculine form of words, or the female and male form as a couple, for instance, when addressing readers as “Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren” (Dear ladies and gentlemen).
Previously, the parliament had used the ideological variant of putting internal capital letters, colons, asterisks, or slashes within nouns that could refer to people of different genders. Signs like the asterisk were meant to include not only females but also people who identify as “transgender.”