Confusions and Misconceptions Between Language, Politics, and Social Respect

From a linguistic standpoint, the controversy surrounding words such as todos (“everyone” or “all”) stems from a conceptual confusion between grammatical gender and social or identity-based gender. This confusion is not innocent, but extralinguistic. Language, as a system, is not a direct mirror of social reality; it is a body of historical conventions shaped by economy, intelligibility, and communicative stability. In Portuguese, grammatical gender is a morphosyntactic category—not an ontological claim, nor an ethical position. Its function is to organize the internal mechanics of the language—agreement, inflection, syntactic cohesion—not to classify or rank people.

When we say todos, we are dealing with an unmarked form that, by convention, encompasses the totality of elements in a mixed or indeterminate group. This marking is structural, not ideological. In linguistics, the unmarked form is not defined by symbolic superiority but by functional scope. The word todos does not inquire into who the subjects are, nor does it require them to declare themselves. It does not discriminate because it does not distinguish. Its strength lies precisely in its semantic indifference to individual identities. It is an economical solution forged over centuries—one that allows inclusion without enumeration, integration without fragmentation.

The confusion arises when demands proper to ethics, politics, or social recognition are projected onto grammar. These domains are legitimate and necessary, but they operate with different instruments. To require language to resolve social tensions is to assign it a function it neither has nor ever had. Languages do not legislate values; they describe and organize the world through conventions.

The example of the word pessoa (“person”) is particularly illuminating. Grammatically feminine, it applies indiscriminately to any human being, regardless of gender identity. A man does not become less masculine by being referred to as uma pessoa. There is no linguistic discomfort here because speakers intuitively understand that grammatical gender does not transfer to the referent. The same is true of countless other nouns: testemunha (“witness,” feminine): he was the main witness in the trial; criança (“child,” feminine): João was a calm child; vítima (“victim,” feminine): the man was a victim of fraud; figura (“figure,” feminine): he is a central figure in literature; entidade (“entity,” feminine), applied to neutral or masculine realities without any identitarian friction.

None of these cases produces a semantic crisis or symbolic injury, because speakers spontaneously distinguish between the grammatical level and the referential level. This competence is part of the implicit linguistic knowledge that all speakers possess. From a scientific perspective, insisting on an identitarian reading of grammatical gender is a category mistake: it confuses sign with referent, form with content, system with ideological use. Modern linguistics—from its structural foundations to contemporary approaches—has consistently affirmed that the value of words arises from their internal relations within the system, not from a moral correspondence with the world.

None of this negates the need for respect, inclusion, or social recognition. On the contrary, it protects those values from a linguistic instrumentalization that risks weakening language itself, making it less functional, less clear, and less shareable. Social inclusion is built through policy, education, and public ethics. Language may accompany these transformations, but not by decree or by morphological overload—rather, organically, slowly, and collectively.

In short, todos does not exclude; it integrates. It does not silence; it encompasses. It does not erase identities; it simply does not interrogate them, because that is not its function. To ask grammar to resolve what belongs to social justice is to misplace the problem and weaken both fields. Language is not a moral tribunal; it is a common tool. And its strength lies precisely in that functional neutrality which allows everyone—quite literally, everyone—to understand one another.

Henrique Levy is a poet, novelist, and essayist. He makes his home in São Miguel, Azores.

Translated by Diniz Borges