Sorry for the click-baitish headline. I just need to say something. And it’s about the word Latinx.
I’m Latinx. Puerto Rican by culture (both parents), but born in the mainland United States, and I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve heard Spanish throughout. Despite that, I have struggled to understand what the rules of gender are in Spanish. Why do some words get the article la and some el. English has its many faults, but assigning gender to inanimate objects (for the most part) is not one of them. As a child it felt frustrating.
When I became an adult, and finally came to accept my status as a gay man, I became aware of the plight of my trans, fluid, and non-binary fellow Q+ persons in negotiating this minefield. It got me thinking. Why do we even have gendered pronouns? Does it really aid at all in language, whether English or Spanish? We don’t have distinct pronouns for race, or age, or any other characteristic that I can think of. I think they is great as a singular, and when someone asks “What’s your pronoun?” I feel good.
I remember when first learning English grammar, that he was supposedly ok to use when you don’t know the gender. I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation as a kid and Picard saying “Who is he?” when talking about an unknown alien who turned out to be female, and thinking, well, it’s proper grammar, I suppose, but isn’t this the future? Haven’t we evolved beyond that? When I became a fan of Pokémon, I started to notice that people use the term he for all the species that didn’t have obvious feminine characteristics, and then saw that for most real animals, he is used when it would be the more reasonable pronoun. Oddly enough, cats seem to be an exception, as a lot of people assume she for whatever reason. It was all so annoying.
A few years ago, I finally put the two and two together: Latino is a gendered term. It’s super obvious. And, since I suffer from anxiety, it started to stress me out. I recently had come to understand that a female-associated word that happened to include me, like when told “Have a good night, ladies!” should only bother me if I am offended by the idea of being a woman. So, I was like, we should just go by Latinas.
How silly of me. Not going to happen. And I thought about how so many languages use gender. What can be done? And while this was happening, I first encountered the word Latinx.
My first thought: Ah, a gender-neutral word for Latinas/Latinos. Cool. But then I tried to say it. Lah-tee-necks? Lah-teenks? How do you pronounce this? It was annoying. Spanish is great in that you can pretty much assume pronunciation of words if you know the alphabet and know the rule for accents and stressing the penultimate syllable. What was that x doing there? The letter x (equis) isn’t really used very much. And it certainly wouldn’t be at the end of a word, at least, not without an e before it.
The more I thought about it, the more imposed it felt. Like the white Americans had decided to be “woke” and create a gender neutral term for my people. I don’t think that was necessarily the case, as my understanding that it came out of a need for Q+ people of our heritage to have a neutral term. But, whoever coined it was seemingly not considering the language family pronunciation.
To me, the English x denotes a strike. An error. Perhaps even nothingness. This is not who we Latinas/Latinos are. I get it’s meant to mean unknown, but why does the gringo get to determine who we are? I spent some time thinking about this, and I have a solution. It’s super arrogant of me, but I am hoping to coin a new term. Since we progressives are pretty much the only people who care, maybe we can start to spread it at DailyKos.
Here’s my idea:
Latiñes (lah-TEE-nyes)
My thinking is it conforms with the rules of Spanish.
It has the genderless e instead of the feminine a and the masculine o.
Most importantly, it has the ñ. A letter that does not exist in English. For non-Spanish speakers, the letter ñ is pronounced like an n followed by a y. It embraces its Spanish nature.
And, for my Brazilian fellow Latiñes, Latinhes could work as a Portuguese version (if my understanding of Portuguese pronunciation is correct).
So, what do you say? Wanna spread the word? I don’t need credit. I just want to be true to my people, both Queer and Latiñe. And I don’t want to sound like a rejected X-Men villain.
P.S. Can we dispose of Mr. and Ms. in The New York Times?