#that said i may start to use schüler*innen instead of lernende now just to piss off söder and his ilk

[nimium-amatrix-ingenii-sui]

For example, if you're talking about teachers, instead of just using the generic male term Lehrer, or using both male and female (Lehrer und Lehrerinnen), you just write Lehrer*Innen (or LehrerInnen, or Lehrer_Innen, depending on preference).

Mixing things up! These are different forms for different contexts, and conflating them ignores the real issue.

LehrerInnen (or Lehrer/-innen) is a fairly old form (at least 40 years) referring to a mixed group within a strict binary: Some teachers are male, some are female. This is the result of feminist objection to the generic masculine on the grounds that women exist and shouldn't be considered "less" (in the sense of not meriting extra mention as soon as there's a single dude in the group).

Lehrer*innen, Lehrer_innen, Lehrer:innen etc. on the other hand are about referring to a mixed group of teachers beyond the binary: some teachers are male, some are female, some are nonbinary, some are agender, and so on. This is the result of a rather more recent objection to either the generic masculine or the feminine-inclusive LehrerInnen on the grounds that there are genders beyond the binary, which are given room by including a "special character" (pronounced as a short pause). So it's a whole step further than just "merging the male and female form", and it's absolutely this step that the Bavarian conservatives (and, frankly, conservatives and even not-so-conservatives in other parts of the country) object to.

Don't get me wrong, they probably objected to LehrerIn back in the day, too! But the backlash here isn't against including the feminine form, it's about including the possibility of people who are neither male nor female, and it's important to keep that in mind.

And yeah, they aren't "banning" asterisks or colons outright, they're refusing to let their state servants and educational institutions use them. Which is still infuriating enough, but not quite the same thing as telling private citizens to exclusively use one specific form.

And yeah, agentive forms like Lehrende or gender-neutral forms like Lehrkräfte (grammatically feminine, but contextually neutral) are excellent ways of following the wording of this particular statute while violating the spirit! And the fun thing about them is that conservatives absolutely know that you're using agentive or neutral forms in order to avoid the binary, so they also make them foam at the mouth, but they can't really object to them on their bullshit "clarity of language" grounds because they're entirely within the traditional grammatical and pragmatic framework of the language. (Personally I like them better anyway, because I feel that what we need is a gender-neutral language, rather than more forms for more genders. But YMMV on that.)

Be gay do crime but in Barvaria and we're putting these everywhere