askchapo

Latinx and latin@ are useful if you want to make a point of being inclusive since they stand out as very intentional but they don’t have general traction even among LGBT communities and basically feel very forced, not at all an equivalent to using they/them in English in that sense.

The issue isn’t just that Spanish is a gendered language, it’s also that Spanish is not always a gendered language. Adverbs and adjectives are not gendered but pronouns are, so constructing a non-gendered pronoun makes the pronoun kind of feel kind of like an adverb which kind of “feels wrong” in an inner logic sense not in a transphobic sense. Nonetheless “latine” still follows the vibe, so to speak, since at least adverbs and adjectives are not gendered so importing that into a pronoun is much less jarring than using x or @.

To approximate it, using “they/them” is natural in English since it was used as a gender neutral pronoun anyway versus some of the other pronoun choices which “stick out” more such as “xi/xey” for example - to be clear I’m not hating, I believe you can choose whatever pronoun you like but xi/xey is more of a statement than they/them if you know what I mean. Similarly Latinx/latin@ are making a statement, which can be great if you want to stridently own your identity or be very overtly inclusive, but not everyone wants to make that kind of statement or prefers to be more subtle basically. Latinx or latin@ intends to be inclusive but it often ends up meaning, in actual practice, “I am speaking specifically about trans people as a group” rather than “Latinos in general” since Latino is, as a matter of actual current practice, what is used to refer to Latinos overall.

What’s more, if you say “a group of Latinos” you don’t actually think of a group of males but a group of Latinos. I do think the practice should change since there is certainly still some subtle effect at play in the masculine form being the default / collective form but to understand the debate, it’s important to be aware that the use of the word Latino does not at all evoke the idea of “a group of males”, except in some very subtle sense. To analogize to English, if you said “a group of doctors” you’re not at all saying they’re males but of course latent sexism might still make most people picture mostly men, it’s more similar to that.

Basically the Spanish language debate isn’t the same as what exists in English and you can’t draw a 1:1 parallel between them since the languages simply work differently, which isn’t to say a change shouldn’t be made - it should be - but it does mean the contours of that change to be made and the way to approach making the change are very different without a clean answer.

There is no broadly accepted standard in Spanish. The best approach is to be sensitive to the audience to whom you’re speaking and, of course, to ask someone for their preference.

If I had to make a choice today which to use I would probably use Latinx if I was trying to express and emphasize inclusivity and also strategically since this would make the chuds mad and move the Overton window enough to make Latine an accepted term that doesn’t bother the chuds as much, but I would prefer to know the preferences of whichever group I am speaking to anyway and go with that.