Abstract

Grammatical gender languages mark gender on every noun and agreement target such as adjectives and pronouns. While the norm for personal nouns provides that the term’s grammatical gender corresponds to its referent’s gender, in certain circumstances, a discrepancy arises between the term and its referent’s gender. Taking Italian as a case study, I identify four such circumstances: reference to non-binary people, women and non-binary professionals in traditionally male-dominated fields, generic or unknown individuals and mixed-gender groups. Among these, I distinguish between usage discrepancies, which depend on how speakers (mis)use language, and structural discrepancies, which depend on structural features of the language. The latter is the case for reference to non-binary people as Italian lacks a grammatical gender corresponding to non-binary gender identities. I focus on this case and argue that it conveys a problematic representation of gender, giving rise to a specific instance of hermeneutical injustice: structural discrepancies depend on a gap in collective interpretative resources (namely, the lack of an appropriate grammatical gender) and put non-binary people at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of their social experiences. As I show, the effects of structural discrepancies possess all the hallmarks of hermeneutical injustice.