Anyone who has flown in an airplane knows that before takeoff, the crew will talk to the passengers as usual, and the first sentence at the beginning is "Ladies and gentlemen".
However, recently, Lufthansa announced that the company and its subsidiaries will cancel the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" when greeting passengers and announcing at the boarding gate. According to the report, Lufthansa will greet passengers with "good morning and good evening" in the future. And the company will make this change when it needs to use national versions of the language, and the new expression is based on the principle of "recognizing all".
Lufthansa has a long history, its predecessor was deutsche Lufthansa GmbH, founded in 1926. In 1955, the West German government established Lufthansa and set sail again that year. In 1997, Lufthansa, together with Air Canada, SAS, Thai Airways and United Airlines, established Star Alliance as the founding company of the alliance.
As one of the best airlines in the world, Lufthansa also owns Swissair, Austrian Airlines, Eurowings and Brussels Airlines.
Lufthansa said in a statement that the reason for canceling the greeting "ladies and gentlemen" was because it was not a gender-neutral statement and was not inclusive enough. A company spokesperson explained:
"In greeting, taking into account that everyone is important to us. This greeting will not be limited to passengers, but will be in all the language of the Lufthansa Group. But it is undeniable that such a conversion requires a time process. ”
Lufthansa is not the first, as early as the end of 2019, Air Canada has become the first major airline to cancel gender notices. Subsequently, easyJet tried similar changes, but there was strong public opposition, so that flight attendants are still free to say "ladies and gentlemen" today.
In October 2020, Delta Air Lines in the United States began using neutral greetings in aircraft broadcasts. Japan Airlines also decided last year to change its English broadcast to a neutral greeting, with flight attendants simply saying "good morning" or "good afternoon."
It is worth mentioning that Japan issued a diversity declaration as early as 2014, saying that it is committed to creating an environment in which a variety of talents are active without considering gender, age, nationality, race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and other attributes.
Japan Airlines' change of English broadcasting is in response to this principle.
Of course, this move has also attracted a lot of opposition. For example, some German Bundesrats believe that Lufthansa's approach is only to cater to the ideology of the left.
At the same time, at the practical level, it will also face difficulties. For example, italian is used to use the positive plural to refer to everyone, somewhat similar to the Chinese use of "they" when referring to a group of men and women, which does not seem to be gender neutral enough, but it is an ancient language, and there is no other word to replace.
In fact, I also think that this practice is a bit overcorrected and overemphasizes political correctness. Moreover, judging from the performance of Europe in recent years, from the terrorist attack crisis to the refugee crisis, the humanitarianism that Europe vigorously cultivated and demonstrated after World War II did shine, but at the same time it also slipped into the strange circle of excessive political correctness, such as indiscriminate "great love", advocating "tolerance" for terrorists, and unconditionally accepting all the customs and even bad habits of refugees.
But then again, despite some formalism and some overcorrection, Europe is indeed ahead of the curve in breaking down gender dualities.
As Schiller, a socioeconomist expert at Bielefeld University in Germany, put it:
"[Lufthansa's approach] is a symbolic move that can be seen as an emphasis on questioning the dualistic view of gender." For those whose gender identity is not in the category of men and women, or who do not agree with the gender binary distinction, it may be easier for them not to use words such as Ms. Lady. ”
In life, gender dualism is actually ubiquitous, and sometimes forms a stereotypical character label. For example, when a man shows fear of something, someone will often blurt out a sentence of "are you a man?" This phrase defines men as animals that don't fear, while turning "fear" into a label for women, but the statement is decidedly arbitrary.
This label even begins with children, and parents have long been accustomed to it. For example, when children play with toys, parents often say"This is something that girls play with, you are a boy, don't play."
According to long-standing patriarchal social norms, physiological males are defined as having a "masculine temperament", and biological females are defined as "feminine temperament". When a person shows that he does not meet the definition of this "binary gender system", it is easy to encounter various kinds of bullying in society. For example, when I was a student, there were often boys who were too weak and labeled as "girly", and girls, even if they had shorter hair and a rougher personality, would be ridiculed as not like girls. Studies have shown that schools that try to break down gender differences and promote gender neutrality tend to be happier than those in schools that emphasize gender labels.
If a certain personality temperament is defined as a patent of a certain gender, and gender cognition that does not conform to the "normal" is defined as wrong, it is bullying of the individual.
Moreover, in the definition of gender, it has never been just men and women, such as "no gender", which is used to describe groups without specific gender identity; "gender twosomes" is a group whose gender identity is between men and women, or gender identity is a mixed group of male elements and female elements; "mobility" refers to a group whose gender identity changes over time...
The essence of pluralistic gender concepts is to break the inherent concept of black and white and protect the rights and interests of individuals. In this respect, Lufthansa's approach is not entirely meaningless. After all, progress is always done subtly.