The French have decided Covid-19 is a woman. I’m insulted, but not for the reasons you think

Turns out this group of 30 men and five women had it in themselves to advocate for feminine forms all along

The French Academy is part of the French Institute (pictured in Paris, France on 20 March 2018). (LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images)

If you’ve ever attempted to learn French, you might be familiar with one of the most annoying pitfalls of my (otherwise lovely) language: every noun has a gender. A table is a girl, but a dresser is a boy. A book is a man, but a sheet of paper is a woman. Air is masculine, but the survival it helps perpetuate is feminine. After I moved to the US, I was shocked the first time I heard someone refer to a bee as “he”. All bees are girls where I’m from. The same applies to mice. I don’t make the rules.

There’s no true rhyme or reason behind this phenomenon, no guiding principle that would make it easy to predict a given noun’s gender. It all results from a combination of linguistics and usage, but really, if you’re learning French as a second language (or third, or fourth, or however many languages you speak, you show-off), you will simply have to memorise each noun’s gender, which I suspect isn’t a pleasant task. (French is my native language, meaning the whole library of genders was drilled into me from birth.)

But here’s the catch. Every once in a while, a new word joins our common vocabulary and a gender will have to be assigned to it. This was the case recently with Covid-19. Yes, even diseases get to be boys and girls in French! (Side note: French sorely lacks a true neutral form, and as such remains annoyingly binary as far as grammar is concerned.)

Enter the Académie Française (the French Academy) or – as its members are known in France – “the immortals” (I’m not making this up). The Academy is a delightfully whimsical concept: It’s an official council meant to rule on matters pertaining to the French language. Despite their nicknames, the people who comprise it are, with all due respect, as mortal as you and me. The French language is the one that’s considered immortal here; although, as we’re about to see, it’s been known to fluctuate spectacularly.

There are 40 members in principle, although the current roster sits at 35, because replacing former members takes time. New members are elected by the current “immortals”, subject to approval by the French president. Then, there’s an official reception, during which the newly chosen member wears a traditional, embroidered suit, and receives – yes – a sword. By the end of the day, that person is ready to slay all instances of grammatical and syntactical incorrectness. (Just kidding — newbies are actually forbidden from actively participating in meetings for the first few months of their tenure, until they become used to the Academy’s customs.)

In a recent memo, the Academy made it known that Covid-19, which has been commonly known in France as le Covid-19 (masculine), should really be la Covid-19 (feminine). Covid, you see, is an acronym for “coronavirus disease”, that is, “disease caused by the coronavirus”, which translates to “maladie provoquée par le coronavirus”. Maladie (disease) is a feminine noun, therefore Covid should also be considered feminine. After all, as the Academy outlined in its memo, the French say la CIA (because an agency, or agence, is a feminine word in French) but le FBI (bureau, which translates to, well, bureau, is a masculine word in the land of Molière). This all makes sense. Case closed, non?

Well, actually, non. Oh, certainly, the Academy’s reasoning behind la Covid makes sense. I’m not going to argue against that. As far as I can tell, yes, we probably should be saying la Covid. We won’t, because we’ve been saying le Covid for months, but now every time we pronounce these words we’ll think about the Academy, and we will feel a slight twinge of disturbance, perhaps a hint of shame knowing we’ve just committed a linguistic sin.

It’s just a little bit ironic to see the Academy so preoccupied with infusing the French language with this specific feminine form, since it has a history of doing pretty much the opposite. Here’s what I didn’t tell you about the Academy when I was too busy rhapsodising about swords and embroidered costumes: Since its creation in 1635, only nine women have been accepted within its ranks. (The first one was Marguerite Yourcenar in 1980.) The current roster includes five women and 30 men. This matters, especially when you consider that one of the thorniest debates currently taking place as far as the French language is concerned has to do with the apparent lack of feminine words for specific professions.

For example, a doctor in French is commonly known as a docteur, regardless of whether the person in question is a man or a woman. Docteur is a masculine word, but for reasons pertaining to the language’s history (i.e. feminine words getting erased over the centuries and replaced by their masculine equivalents), it’s now considered neutral. In other words, it remains le docteur, even if you’re a female doctor.

Allow me to specify one thing, as I realise that English speakers have precisely the opposite conundrum: people we might have called “actresses” in the past have (rightfully) insisted on being referred to as “actors”. That’s because neutrality is the norm in English; in French, it’s not, and it’s quite natural to feel erased when your own language doesn’t deign to reflect your existence. The lack of certain feminine forms in French is all the more suspicious when you consider that words such as “cleaner”, “seductor”, or “traitor” all have widely accepted feminine versions, unlike “author”, “doctor”, or even “painter”.

Many people, myself included, believe that there is no valid reason why we shouldn’t use a female form for “doctor” and other professions which aren’t just to do with domestic work. The Academy, however, has a history of being stubbornly opposed to changes that would make the French language more inclusive and/or less masculine. In 2019, the institution finally said it was opening the door to more feminine job titles, with some significant caveats. That decision came as a temporary conclusion to a seemingly unending controversy, and the fight to make French language more inclusive is far, far from over.

Still, if the current situation has taught me one thing, it’s this: The Academy had it in itself to advocate for more feminine forms all along. All it took was a global pandemic.