ShardikprimePorque no los Dos?
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.
The fact that not seeming silly is more important to your sense of right and wrong than accepting someone’s chosen identity on their terms and potentially saving their life by doing so, is why nobody wants to listen to your opinions on queer people. Jerk.
I mean, I am a queer person, but ok.
If you are gonna decide to guilt trip me by saying someone might potentially kill themselves if I refer to them as… them or he or she instead of bun or jae, then I’d say you’re being emotional abusive.
Also, judging by the votes I’ve gotten so far, it seems you’re gaslighting me when you say no one wants to listen.
Its not that neo-pronouns seem silly.
Its that they convey no useful meaning to anyone who does not already know that person, personally.
Sometimes you have to write things down in a manner that conveys useful information to say, apply a person for a government grant or aid of some kind. Sometimes these things are gender or sex specific.
Sometimes people who don’t know a person need to read things about them and make decisions that could prevent them from starving to death, being murdered from a domestic abuser or living on the streets.
Writing bun repeatedly in correspondence or on a government form isn’t going to work.
You cannot have a potentially infinite list of pronouns that you somehow expect everyone to just learn, and make this work in any kind of wide system where people don’t know that they even are pronouns.
Pronouns are kind of a fundamental, fixed element of English.
Its different with a noun or adjective as there are many of those, and it is far, far easier to learn new ones and use them correctly.
Like, I’m an anarchist, but not to the point of total linguistic anarchy.
He/She/They is fine, and won’t confuse the hell out of everyone. We have pronouns in English that are not gender deterministic, nor dehumanizing, and they are They and Them and Their and Themself.
Hell, when I was managing the databases for the non profit I worked at, I went through a ton of work to add in the ability for clients to be able to indicate their preferred pronouns and have it be reflected system wide.
No one, out of thousands, used it. Not one, and that includes tons of people who identified as trans, gay, lesbian, bi, pan, asexual.
After 6 months we reverted to he/she/they because, in addition to no one using it, having 4 open string fields instead of a key value indexed to a lookup table was slowing down the server and potentially a security risk if someone decided their pronouns include ;“DROP TABLE *” or something like that.
If neo-pronouns are ever going to make sense, they are going to need to have agreed upon and fixed definitions.
If you want to say that ok, from now on, She and He are for straight cis people, and i don’t know, Je and Ke now refer to lesbian women and gay men, and you go on like that, as long as these terms actually have fixed agreed upon meanings, so on, they aren’t easily confused with existing words, then maybe something like that could work.
You would need a defined system capable of being taught to PreK through 5 students such that they could learn it.
I don’t see anything like that. I see a tiny minority of terminally online people making up new pronouns, unable to define them, and often changing them at a whim.
On a personal, colloquial, relatively close relationship level, neo pronouns can work the same way and inside joke or lingo amongst a tight knit group of people can.
Not on the scale of millions or billions, not without meaningful, at least initially fixed definitions.
EDIT: I just now realized you are the passive aggressive anti-realist solipsist, “I believe in magic but I can’t define it” person who argued that atheists are jerks because by telling them what they define magic as.
Nothing quite seems to irk my autism like people who break language, congrats I guess on riling me up again.
I’m not a solipsist, I’m an antirealist. I believe things are real, but that reality is a social construct and must be abolished.
Oh, telling me what I think and do again!
How original.
Let me know when you find the part of my text where I say I willfully misgender trans people.
Fuck, I’ve nearly been killed over defending a trans person and their preferred pronouns.
But you’re the arbiter of reality, so I guess nah, actually I’m awful.
Oh well.
Patapon EnjoyerThere’s nothing more important to me than self determination. Now excuse me while I determine that your entire identity is invalid because you… refer to each person using the words they prefer you to use according to situation and social context?
Also the point of personal pronouns isn’t to communicate information to others. It’s to validate the person who has the pronouns. Your giant wall of text ignores the entire argument I actually made and the entire point of pronouns. Maybe you should try caring about trans people instead of worrying about everyone else, and then you’d understand the point of trans pronouns.
Every trans person I have ever met uses he or she.
NBs use they.
I’ve literally gotten in brawls defending trans people where I was the only person using their preferred pronouns and this pissed off a whole gaggle of people who were assaulting them.
Your argument was that I could potentially kill (apparently you were referring only to trans?) people by not using their preferred pronouns.
Not only is that not a thing I do, not only are you incapable of understanding my apparently too nuanced position for you, I have literally done the inverse of what you claim of me, and have risked my life specifically over properly using a trans person’s pronouns, and may have saved their life.
Do you remember when I said your view of the history of magic, along with your rhetorical tactics, are quite similar to fascism techniques?
I guess not.
You’ve never met a trans enby? Dayum, so sheltered! You should try getting out there and meeting more queer people than just your little bubble.
Fundamentally, the use of pronouns is to point towards something. And the more information loaded into a pronoun, the better it can point. They arent here to validate the person, but to convey information and to point towards them during conversation.
People choosing their own personal pronouns, thereby choosing the way theyre pointed at, has the added benefit of validating them. But from a linguistical standpoint, all they do is change the pointer and the informations and assumption tacked onto that pointer.
What the person above wants to express is: While neopronouns can be used in personal conversation, its not feasible to include them into the curriculum for anyone and the chance of your specific neopronoun ending up as a widely used one within your native language are near zero. I think your friends and your immediate surrounding should definitely address you by them, but you cannot expect anyone who interacts with you to use them or keep them in mind.
Better than neo-pronouns, single person identifiers should be what they have always been, their name and set the pronouns as they/them, for English at least.
If I could, I would hug you and give you a pastry. Thank you for being amazing, giving good explanations and keeping your cool in the face of that dumbass jerk. Hell knows my queer, autistic ass just can’t cope.
Language is important because it helps convey things. If a language is mangled to the point where it can’t be understood, it is no longer a language at all, and the person you have been responding to seems to either be a troll, too profoundly stupid or actively unwilling to engage in proper communication.
You cannot have a potentially infinite list of pronouns that you somehow expect everyone to just learn
Ackchyually yes, we do, they’re called names. A bit different, they’re nouns not pronouns, but functionally there’s gigantic overlap and best of all if the name is short enough it’s actually not much of a bother to never use pronouns to refer to that person. Most of all, it’s regular because we already conjugate names (“bun arrived”, “bun’s pants”, “the letter is for bun”). “bun brushes bun’s hair” not to mention “bun dresses bunself” sounds a bit strange but is perfectly cromulent.
…still if you get your panties in a twist over being addressed “they” instead of whatever you’re used to or, strictly speaking prefer, I think you’re off the mark. I’m cis call me they all you want: Being generic doesn’t take away from anyone’s identity. It’s like being upset that you’re being referred to as a human instead of a barber.