This is the best summary I could come up with:

The latest skirmish in the culture war over inclusive language has been playing out this week in France, where the senate voted in favour of a proposal to ban the use of less-gendered terms in official documents.

Les Républicains, the centre-right party behind the move, had claimed that inclusive neologisms such as iel – a mix of the male and female pronouns il and elle – and more general efforts to end the entrenched masculine bias in French were part of an “ideology that endangers the clarity of our language”.

Similar arguments are taking place across Europe and beyond as people – from politicians to parents – debate the role language should play in protecting and promoting diversity, inclusion and representation.

Opposition sénateurs and sénatrices disagreed with the outcome of Monday’s vote, describing it as a “retrograde and reactionary” text, a view shared by France’s independent high commission for equality between women and men.

“Far from attracting the support of a majority of contemporaries, it appears to be the preserve of an elite, unaware of the difficulties encountered on a daily basis by educators and users of the school system,” the academy said in a statement.

The decision sparked controversy, with the leftwing politician Laura Boldrini saying: “There is something strange about her; she hides behind the masculine.” Meloni sarcastically hit back that she did not think a woman’s “greatness” should be defined by being called capatrena – a nonexistent feminine form of capotreno, or train conductor.

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