Gendered language in Poland
Polish language is in general binary, each noun has its own gender (ex. a cat is ‘his’, but a daisy is ‘her’); verbs also have incorporated gender in their forms. However there is also neuter gender in our language which is used predominantly for the third person of singular form. Creating neutral form of some verbs, especially in the past tense, is difficult however possible. Form “byłom” is an example of such situation (neutral form of verb “I was” in the past tense) – many people cannot do such transition.
In order for neutral forms to become established in the Polish language, we need several (dozen) models of variety, which we can apply successfully to any noun we can think of. People need to hear and see such forms to be able to use them. In Polish, nonbinarity is most often associated with choosing a gender-neutral name (e.g. Alex) and using pronouns assigned to the opposite gender to the metric. However, this is not always the case. Some non-binary people use gender-neutral language, bypassing the genus, saying, for example. , ‘My place of birth is Łódź”’. Another example is a descriptive form of language: instead of saying “actress” we can say “a person who plays in the movies” avoiding using terms “Mr or Mrs”.