But don’t you dare mention the e or @ or heaven forbid the dreaded x, because accomodating identities not traditionally considered in a language’s common form is “white people shit”

Every single American born person of hispanic heritage, every first gen Spanish speaking immigrant I have ever known or met, as a friend, momentary acquaintance, or as a social worker helping to aid the homeless…

…every one that I have met in the real world either thinks latinx is laughably stupid (as in they literally laugh when the topic is brought up), or they are visibly confused.

And of friends and acquaintances, I know they ranged all over the political spectrum.

I wish no ill will on whoever came up with the term, but it just is not sensible to anyone who is not terminally online.

Hablo un pocquito español, so… as far as I can tell, there is at least existing precedent for the e ending, but I’ll leave it up to the actual members of the language group and its culture to come up with a term (hell, there may be many different local or regional ways to accomplish it, as Spanish varies considerably by region and locale).

Actual members of the language group and culture did come up with a term, they came up with the x, and the anti-queer-machismo undercurrent in Latine society drove the lot to hysterics about the end of the spanish language and the gringoification of Latine culture.

Every time I see someone try to excuse this shit they’ll spin some variant of “let them decide what term to use”, and I’m like, why isn’t the same right afforded to the queer folks who came up with those terms?

What about the greater Latine culture gives them a superior right to the Latine queer community to decide what letter to use? Why is not listening to the language community in question suddenly ok when it means overriding what the Latin Queer community outright told y’all they wanted in favor of appeasing los machismos who are all suddenly heads of the spanish academy and grammar experts as soon as it’s convenient to be so to shout down some gay math nerds who wanted to be clever and punny in their chatspeak representation?

The Anglosphere didn’t have the right to tell our queer community what they were gonna be called, why should we respect the hispanosphere trying to say they have that right?

Look, if someone wants to identify as latinx, I’m not going to stop them.

If the term was, as you say, invented by gay latinx math nerds in chat rooms then sure, it works for them on internet chatrooms or in the real.

There does seem to be significant contention as to where and how the term arose, as well as its usage, and that’s from LGTBQ writers, activists and academics.

Some are for it, some are against it, and its not just because of machismo. I’m seeing a whole bunch of articles from a quick search of people writing arguments against latinx from differing perspectives such as X is a product of settler colonialism, it erases blackness, it erases femicides, etc etc, and again this is coming from LGBTQ magazines.

My point was that in practical usage, specifically when serving in a non profit assisting the homeless, the term is a point of confusion, and more generally, it is basically an online term that works when written, but not when spoken.

Sure, if you grew up knowing English you can probably pronounce it, but a Spanish only speaker usually looks at the word and thinks it is a misspelling, as generally latinx does not result in an easily pronounceable sound following Spanish pronunciation rules.

The only similar analogy I can think of in English is the rainbow of pronouns invented by Tumblr.

I have no problem calling a NB person ‘they/them’.

But when it gets to things like xer/xem or bun/buns or fae/faer or some of the other, wackier pronouns I’ve seen… its often words that are very awkward to say aloud, and they just seem ridiculous.

As a native straight Spanish speaker, I’d like to thank you for so eloquently explaining many of my problems with this way of referring to people’s genders. There’s no way the language would survive if we were to adapt to these gender neutral modifiers. Spanish is a gendered language and if we were to adapt to these non binary gender terms, we’d also have to apply it for about half our vocabulary. We’d all have to agree a washing machine for example is now no longer a female lavadora, but rather a lavadore or lavadorx. It’d be impossible to gather the entire Spanish speaking community across dozens of countries to agree on the general way standardize this.

Fuck them nonbinaries just wanting to not be misgendered every single day of their existence, right?