The output tracking problem of gear transmission servo (GTS) systems with backlash nonlinearity is studied in this paper. A new concept-"soft degree"-is proposed to overcome the nondifferentiable "hard" characteristic of the backlash nonlinearity. Furthermore, a detailed softening process-static softening is presented, where a backstepping control algorithm is developed to guarantee that the output of the controlled systems can track any given desired sufficiently smooth trajectory by arbitrary precision and the limit cycles that appear due to backlash nonlinearity can be avoided. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.Note to Practitioners-Backlash universally exists in gear transmissions where the moving parts temporarily lose direct contact, which is a major factor affecting the systems dynamic performance and steady precision. Existing approaches for eliminating backlash nonlinearity are mainly divided to two categories due to the nondifferentiable property of the traditional deadzone model: one is the inverse model compensation method, which is not preferable in practical applications for the existence of physical inertia; the other is a multimodel switching method that divides the controlled system into several subsystems and then designs controllers for each subsystem, which makes the control design problem very complex and difficult. Motivated by these, this paper proposes a "soft degree" concept based on a recently developed differentiable deadzone model, and then presents a practical backstepping algorithm to achieve not only high-precision output tracing but also limit cycles elimination.