I speak English because of Colonialism so when I say this I say this as a person who does not know any other language. How is a language like Spanish or Portuguese even able to reform itself to be gender neutral when all the words are masculine or feminine and people look at you like a weirdo if you use the gender neutral versions. I’m not saying all gendered language is bad, but its wrong for an entire profession to gendered one way or another or to have gender be seen as a binary thing in the first place.

What I’m trying to say is, how do you do it?

  • readoncontradiction [none/use name]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Again I don’t know Spanish but doesnt Latine make more sense than Latinx? English uses the letter X more as a symbol than as an actual letter (see Elon Musk’ obsession with it for example), while Spanish uses it much more in daily conversation. So using X to replace the gendered part of Latino/Latina seems pretty neo-colonialist to me. It just doesn’t seem right for American English to be dictating how Spanish is spoken even if it’s for the purpose of inclusivity of all things. Look what happened with the word Indian, it’s offensive but not using it can also be offensive. The biggest problem is that the native speakers didn’t get a choice in what they wanted to be called. And while Spanish is not a native language (especially in Al Andalus), Spanish speakers do face discrimination for their language. I don’t know shrug-outta-hecks your racist if you use Latinx, you’re homophobic if you use Latino. I just try to default to Hispanic as much as possible. Which offends Portuguese speakers, so then I just use Latin, which doesn’t make sense because then we are just talking about Italian and I don’t give a shit about Italians. Overall I find it very confusing.

    • hello_hello [comrade/them]
      ·
      4 months ago

      I don't think it's such a big deal, I think anglos/English natives just don't know they're not supposed to pronounce the -x part so they get confused. Latin American works fine in English but most Latin Americans don't see themselves as Latin* but their national identity as Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Costa Ricans, Cubans etc. And there are white latinos like that German guy who lives in Argentina with a lot of WW2 memorabilia.

      It's weird in Spain since the national identity is Spanish but the national language is castelllano or the Spanish dialect of Spain.