> it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers

I'd recommend getting out a bit more or reading a bit more:

> According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[7][21][22] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language."[20][23] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.[24][25] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.[21] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx

From the same wiki:

> Despite the increase in awareness, use of the term to describe oneself has not greatly increased over time.[4] As of 2018, use of the term Latinx was limited nearly exclusively to the United States.[29] Manuel Vargas writes that people from Latin America ordinarily would not think of themselves using the term unless they reside in the United States.[29]

Maybe it didn't technically originate in privileged English speakers but it certainly seems to have arisen in popularity among them.

As someone who lives in a 99% hispanic region in the US, I've never heard anyone use this term to identify themselves. We're right on the border and that sort of thing seems to mainly happen in larger cities north of here.

I’m not saying no one who identifies as Latino/Latina/Latinx has ever used the word, or even advocated for it. But the only people I’ve ever heard use this term are, bluntly, very white.

To the extent that the term has become widespread, it seems to have piggybacked on other diversity and inclusion efforts. People who identify as Latino/Latina seem overwhelmingly to dislike the term.

> Among Hispanic and Latino Americans, knowledge of the term is not widespread, and reception to the term as a potential classifier for the entire Hispanic/Latino population has been overwhelmingly negative. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly half of U.S. Hispanics were not aware of the term Latinx; of those aware of it, 75% said it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, preferring instead the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" by large margins.

Ironically, the also relatively uncommon “Latine” is in decline but still more popular than Latinx for all of recorded Google trends history. Except in the US. Of course.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=latinx,L...

LatinX to me reeks of white savior and HR speak.

Here in Spain both the 'x' and '@' versions are really common in written language. The 'e' version I've not seen. But they're not really spoken because the X and @ versions are weird to pronounce. Replacing the o and a with an e makes more sense but it hasn't really seemed to have reached here.

And no it's not just privileged white people. My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.

My native language has no gender. Every time I see these conversations I wonder “why not do away with the gender?”

It often leaks information the speaker didn’t intend to share. e.g., “I met a friend. She was late.”

Did the speaker mean or care to share to gender of this friend? Is it relevant? I don’t think so.

And I find it especially interesting when people argue for gender-neutral plurals, but then happily use gendered noun. It sort of feels like “everyone must stay in their lane” type of expectation.

Even the patriarchy argument is weird. The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context. Wanna stick it to patriarchy? Nix the gender from all languages!

> The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context

Did they? English used to be gendered but lost it ~1000 years ago.

Languages evolve in odd ways and don’t think the patriarchy or religion have much to do with it.

English is still strongly gendered: the animate and inanimate genders are everywhere. The masculine/feminine subgenders are still present in pronouns of the animate gender.

If English were to truly evolve to be non-gendered, there would be no "he/him/them" or "she/her/them", only "it/that/those".

I wonder how you would feel about, for example, Slavic languages. There, you leak information about the gender even about speaking about yourself in first person (at least in the ones I have some idea about). Example in Polish:

"Spotkałem kolegę" - "I [male] met a [male] friend."

"Spotkałam kolegę" - "I [female] met a [male] friend."

"Spotkałem koleżankę" - "I [male] met a [female] friend."

"Spotkałam koleżankę" - "I [female] met a [female] friend."

Notice the different ending (em/am) depending on whether a male or female is speaking.

> My native language has no gender. Every time I see these conversations I wonder “why not do away with the gender?”

Yes, many languages have no gender or have a generic option besides genders.

I always find this very annoying in Roman languages, where every object has an arbitrary gender, and to make matters worse it's not always the same. A word that is female in Spanish could be male in Italian or Portuguese. It trips me up a lot and it's annoying because the gender is just some arbitrary thing there, it has no meaning because objects have no gender. If we're talking about people I can understand but things?

But languages are not very logical. They are something that melted together over centuries out of habit.

It adds real world flavor, instead of mashing everyone and everything into the same grey goo of genderlessness.

It’s no surprise that the strongest (mainstream) gendered languages are also known as the ‘Romance languages’.

Is it logically simpler in some ways to not have it? Of course. Let’s not even talk about how complex gendered verb conjugations are in Spanish or Portuguese, for example.

But it does allow a lot of beautiful flourishes that add a lot of color.

They're known as the Romance languages because the languages are rōmānicē (Roman-style), not because they're romantic.

Romance in the context of languages means they were derived from Latin, the language of Rome.

Technically yes - And also why every single one of the cultures speaking those languages is known for it’s lovers?

I had no idea that was a stereotype of Romanians.

Romanians have a variant which is a bit less flattering.

Persian doesn't have gender and Iran is famously not patriarchal at all.

Interesting. Google trends shows that Latine is more common in Spain (and everywhere that isn’t the US).

Nonetheless I appreciate a perspective from someone who has an affiliation with the culture term refers to.

Ah I have to say I'm not reading much official media in Spanish, perhaps the media is taking up these terms faster. But I see x and @ in official event posters too.

But my friends and in the LGBT+ communities chat groups I only see people using the x and @.

I have never seen Latin@ at all (but I also do not speak Spanish). Is that a common a/o replacement?

I find it interesting that the Hispanic LGBTQ+ community would use LatinX. How is this even pronounced in Spanish? Latin-equis? Or is it the English Latin-ex?

Yes in my scene @ and x are both common. I like the @ option.

Like I said nobody pronounces either option because it's unpronounceable. That's why the 'e' is a better option IMO.

You can pronounce it as “Latine”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261926

But then why not just write “Latine”?

Because there are consonants that change their sound before an “e”. So, say, the word “chicos” (boys) and “chicas” (girls) should be written as “chiques” in neutral because the c sounds like an s and not like a k with an e in front… but “chiques” doesn’t look like “chicos”… visually it’s not recognizable… while “chicxs” is much easier to parse. So that's why some people prefer the neutral to be written with an x.

I’m curious on people’s opinions here cause I have seen this both ways. I have seen people say gender in the language at all is bad. And have said Spanish is sexist.

I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.

> I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.

If you look up the list of exceptions to the whole "-a = feminine, -o = masculine" in Spanish, it's incredibly long (and covers many of the most common words). Similarly there are a whole bunch where the gender is correct, but the article is swapped because it sounds better. The gender of specific words is also arbitrary, and doesn't agree between the various Romance languages.

This whole thing is just the leftover pieces of Latin's 3x linguistic genders hanging around in our languages, and ceased to be related to actual gender centuries ago.

> Similarly there are a whole bunch where the gender is correct, but the article is swapped because it sounds better.

Yes, like "el agua" but agua is a female word. Soo confusing when you are learning it.

Old English for “wife” was masculine. “Maiden” in German is neutral. In Italian, the formal “you” is the same as “she” (written capitalized).

Grammatical gender is not intrinsically sexist and doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you try to analyze it to tease out what patriarchs were thinking when they added these forms, because largely they never thought about it at all. The forms evolved over hundreds of years.

“Maiden” in German is neutral.

Nachweise erbeten (citations, please). :)

I was asking for Maiden, plural of Maid. [1]

1. [https://www.dwds.de/wb/Maid]

dpark is using a slightly archaic translation, Mädchen would normally be rendered as "girl" in modern English.

Correct. I was referring to Mädchen and my German is extremely rusty.

Should have said ‘The German word for “Maiden” is neutral.’

My phrasing was ambiguous and my German is rusty, hence the archaic translation.

As my high school teacher memorably put it: “in Germany girls have no sex”.

There are also languages where the gender changes from singular to plural! What do we think of this?

I can't say I follow these things too closely, and I do find them silly, but I think that, at least for languages that have "genders", this mostly comes from words describing professions that "seem gendered". I don't think many people care if a bag is feminine or masculine.

For example, in French, a doctor is "masculine", but a secretary is feminine. The point was that young girls would see these words and figure, "I can't be a doctor because I'm not a man. Guess I'll just be a nurse (which is feminine, but also has a masculine form)".

Now, I think there may be some kind of truth to the fact that many such professions were traditionally held by people of the "same gender". And, now that these traditions don't hold as much anymore, especially for "prestigious" professions, people want to make a point that there's a difference, especially in things like politics and medicine.

Of course, I don't remember much noise being made about how to call a woman who picks up garbage (though there are quite a few) or does construction work (haven't seen that many).

>My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.

Was the eye roll part of the sarcasm or...? Colombian and other related Spanish speaking cultures do the same things, so what's her point, to feel like she's sticking it to the invisible spanish dude?

No, she genuinely hated that even though it is part of Colombian culture too. But being part of a culture doesn't mean you 100% agree with everything.

I'm Dutch myself and I hate many things in Dutch culture. Especially those stemming from the calvinist influences. It's one of the reasons I don't live there anymore.

  calvinist influences

Admittedly I don't really know about dutch/some other regions -- could you expand on that?

Which is funny because the entire Spanish-speaking world has always been deeply matriarchal.

No not really. In the Spanish language the masculine form always takes precedence.

And they are also catching up on feminism. Until recently here in Spain a woman would have to prove there had been violence when claiming rape. There was a big headline-making case where some rapists went free (well until supreme court appeal): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Manada_rape_case It led to the "only yes is yes" law which was already prevalent in other countries.

Even then, women hold all the soft power in Spanish-speaking countries. For example, at home, whatever the woman says, that’s what’s done. That’s what a matriarchy is.

Also, convicting people without proof, that’s not something to be proud of. (This also proves they live in a matriarchy)

> convicting people without proof

They literally videotaped it and shared the video in a group chat.

There was no question of whether the assault happened, only whether it met the bar for the more severe crime.

There was no proof of lack of consent. But I wasn’t talking about this particular case anyway.

women control the inside, men the outside.

that's just biology and it's the case the world over, not only spanish countries.

The sillyness of LatinX is that there isn't even an "Ecks" sound in Spanish.

I assume you pronounce that X as the X in Mexico.

that is even worse

The X in Spanish is sometimes used to “neutralize” the gender of a word. An alternative is the @, as in “latin@“. Visually the x is more harmonic, because of its smaller size, and the fact that there are lower and uppercase versions.

That x is generally pronounced as an “e” in Spanish (i.e. “latine”, not “latin eks” or “latinks” and most certainly not “latinj”, as the j sound of x is only before a vowel, e.g. xavier = javier).

But why write an x and not an e? Because there are consonants that change their sound with an “e”. So, say, the word “chicos” (boys) and “chicas” (girls) would be written as “chiques” in neutral because the c sounds like an s and not like a k with an e in front… but “chiques” doesn’t look like “chicos”… visually it’s not recognizable… while “chicxs” is much easier to parse.

This is how it works. I don’t care to enter a discussion of whether this is nice or not, good or bad. I’ll just leave with the anecdote that I once participated in a project that involved a big survey written in the traditional “neutral” form, which consists of writing “chicos/as” to covers both binary genders. That form quickly becomes very hard to read… “Los chicos/as están sentados/as con sus nuevos/as compañeros/as”. Use of the x has a lot of pushback from some people, but all in all, it’s easier to adapt to.

It's not. And that shows just poor education. Differently from the US, in Spanish we have the RAE (Real Academia Española). That dictates and gives guidelines on how to write so most people will understand what you are writing. The fact that you are having these issues just shows poor education, these topics have been discussed, and they are clear rules to avoid this non sense. Don't invent rules, read what has been already created for you to write clearly in Spanish.

Speaking of ways to demonstrate ignorance, Spanish language usage in America is driven by Central and South American speakers, and they do not consider themselves bound by some bunch of Europeans telling them how to speak their own language.

Not really, it's the dictionary of record for the Spanish language and what is commonly used in academia and dinner table debates. As to whether people feel bound to it or not it's the same as how people use any other language colloquially, i.e. a dictionary is largely irrelevant or an afterthought. I have also never come across someone personally arguing against it as a "bunch of Europeans telling them how to speak their own language," most of us are pretty aware of the fact that our language descended from Castilian Spanish.

Linguistics are descriptive, not prescriptive. I'm explaining how things work in practice, not how they're supposed to be according to the wishes or mandates of some foreign institution and its followers.

Judging something and understanding something are different processes. The RAE creates guidelines, but people often speak and write without following them, and that's still worthy of examination.

I can't help but read it as "la-tinks". And then I think of Tinkerbelle, who has the nickname Tink.

Gives vibes of saying “unhoused” instead of homeless.

I feel like the affluent just love to invent new words to show the “others” that aren’t using it how backwards they are, and how the affluent are truly enlightened.

I also thought unhoused was just a pointless euphemism, but I recently learned it does have a technical meaning. A "homeless" person might live with friends, in a shelter, or on the street. An unhoused person is one strictly living on the street/car/public space.

This is interesting. Two things can be true though. There may be a technical distinction between the two terms but I think many people (like me, until now!) don't know it, which means that many people do use it as a euphemism and not as its technical intention.

Like being quoted out of context.

It's just so easy to mock terms and phrases of art, to spin up the general public.

People like Chris Rufo, who mine legal, bureaucratic, technical, etc. phrases, are trolls.

If I had a friend who was staying with us because he had no other place to be, he wouldn't be homeless. That's like saying my 13 yr old is homeless because his name's not on the mortgage. The only point of the euphemisms is for people to feel self-righteous for policing language. Which they often do because it's lazier than any sort of real reform.

That's just not true. Your 13yr old is your legal responsibility, whilst you have a home, they do to.

Someone who you generously take in now has a roof over their head but they have literally zero protections - you can argue with them tomorrow and be within your rights to throw them out.

Someone with nowhere at all to stay might die of the cold tonight.

Homelessness charities absolutely want to know which case you are in. They require different interventions with different priorities.

You are correct.

>That's just not true. Your 13yr old is your legal responsibility, whilst you have a home, they do to.

You miss my point so thoroughly, it can only be genius. I know that it's not true. My son's not homeless. The other guy implied it, because he can't come up with a logical test of who and who isn't homeless.

If your friend moves into your guest room and receives mail there, etc. they are not homeless. If they sleep on your couch 5 days a month then circulate among 6 friends doing the same, they are.

If I buy a plot of land out in the middle of nowhere and do not inform the post office, apparently I'm homeless too, even if I built a mansion on said land.

Your measurements of homelessness are dumb and not representative of the condition most people think of when they are thinking of homelessness.

I don’t think anyone would describe non-rent paying cohabitant as “homeless”. I truly don’t believe we needed another word. It’s just different for different’s sake.

It’s essentially the same word too:

“Un” == “less” “Home” == “house”

It’s just another example of the Euphemism Treadmill.

I think the Latino community who cares about such things prefers "latine".

LatinX is awful. An AIM screen name from 1998.

Latini Latine tantum loqui deberent

I'm South African so wouldn't really know culturally how African Americans would see it, but wondered at the time if the changing of the Git default branch name to "main" was an initiative by European Americans worried about offending rather than actual offense taken by African Americans.

It is interesting how different locations find different things offensive. Only when I was living in Europe for a while (doing Blizzard Customer Service) did I became aware of how big a deal the usage of N word was, as over here the K-word (look up "South Africa k-word" if you don't know it) is the word of choice for the, unevolved, die hard racists.

Was similarly unaware, (but not really surprised in hindsight) how World War II references were much better left avoided and Nazi references an enormous no-no. Over here references to Nazism are very rare and while South Africans did fight and die for the Allies in Europe, the impact of WW2 over here was no where near what it was like for most of the rest of the world.

Is the "k-word" the Arabic for infidel? If yes, were there a lot of Arabs/Arabic speakers in South Africa?

No and no

It has etymological roots in the Arabic word, but is spelt differently and it has no meaning or use except as a slur of which there is nothing more offensive to say to blacks (“blacks” is a completely acceptable term here).

We don’t have much of an Arabic community here.

Most Latino/latinas I’ve discussed this with find Latinx offensive because there are strong (positive) gender associations with each, and it appears to be explicitly trying to erase them.

Classifying a Latina as a Latino or vice-versa will get you in a pretty serious fight in a lot of places.

I'm a latino (US citizen, born in Latin America). Somebody said that also at my job. LatinX is despised by most Latin people living in the US. It's acceptance rate is less than 2%. Comes from a 'scholar' invention, and aside of the scholars with both hands in their ears that want to use it, almost all Hispanic and Latinos dislike the term, specially the ones living in the US. I compared it to using the N word with African American people. Call them something they want to be called, not whatever you want to call them.