How Marlies Krämer reshaped gender-inclusive language debates

Marlies Krämer's decades-long fight for gender-inclusive language lives on

Until 2018, Marlies Krämer was unknown to most people. But then, at her wit's end, she turned to Germany's Federal Court of Justice. Her demand was simple: she wanted official documents to address her as a woman. Up to that point, an old, ironclad rule had prevailed—forms, questionnaires, and application papers were written exclusively in the masculine. This frustrated Krämer, especially when she had to fill in deposit and payment slips at her Sparkasse bank, where she was a customer, entering sums under the labels "Einzahler" (depositor) and "Zahlungsempfänger" (payee). "I am a woman," she thought, "and that makes me an Einzahlerin and a Zahlungsempfängerin."

A shift to gender-inclusive language in official forms might well have succeeded. As early as 1996, Krämer—a saleswoman, sociologist, and feminist—had already secured a change in passports, ensuring that the signature field referred to either the "Inhaberin" (female holder) or "Inhaber" (male holder). Similarly, it was thanks to her advocacy that, since 1999, low-pressure weather systems have alternated between female and male names. She rightly criticized the previous practice of assigning only female names to such systems as misogynistic.

Yet her local Sparkasse branch in Saarland remained obstinate. Accommodating her request for forms that included both women and men would require reprinting too much paperwork, they argued. Besides, the term "der Kunde" (the customer) automatically included "die Kundin" (the female customer). Undeterred, the then 80-year-old Krämer took her case through every available legal instance. Her argument never wavered: the General Equal Treatment Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender. If women were addressed as men in official forms, she insisted, that was discrimination, plain and simple.

The Federal Court of Justice sided with the bank, but Krämer refused to back down and appealed to the Federal Constitutional Court. There, too, she lost. In 2020, the court declined even to consider her constitutional complaint, ruling that it failed to meet the necessary justification requirements.

Now, Marlies Krämer is dead. She passed away on February 4 at the age of 88, as announced by the State Chancellery in Saarbrücken.

Though she had faded from the public eye in recent years, the debate over gender-inclusive language has only grown more intense. The self-described feminist's legacy endures in a language now marked by colons, capitalized internal Is, underscores, and asterisks—forms that conservative and right-wing forces have placed on their blacklist, seeking to abolish them. Anyone who ever knew Marlies Krämer can imagine the steadfast determination and unshakable optimism with which this ever-positive woman would have resisted such backward-looking linguistic demands.