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[-] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 141 points 1 month ago

A bit ignorant take. Grammatical gender does not always imply the actual gender of the subject, and Spanish can easily form gender neutral-nouns or sentences. For example: "persona no binaria" is entirely made with "feminine" words, but it's meaning (non-binary person) is entirely gender-neutral.

This is also why most Spanish speakers make fun of anglophones who use "latix". It's embarrassing, condescending and completely unnecessary, it shows a lack of understanding of how Spanish is actually used by it's speakers

Here's another common way to make gender-neutral Spanish, while making it explicit:

Take the sentence "The workers are radicalizing." Workers is "Trabajadores" a masculine-plural word. The Royal Academy of Spanish Language, clarifies that the maculine form of any noun includes participants of any gender, so to say "Los Trabajadores se están radicalizando" would be grammatically correct, and no Spanish speaker would really asume you only have male workers. However, to make inclusion more explicit, it isn't uncommon for companies to use double articles: "Las y los trabajadores se están radicalizando." Notice that the noun has remained in masculine form, instead the articles have been used to make it explicit that the writer does see gender as a binary. You would see this in office-settings, but as you can hopefully see. Doing it like this actually reinforces the binary perspective, rather than the other way around.

TL&DR: Use "Latino/a" or "Hispanic", instead of "Latix" if you don't want your maid and gardener to laugh their asses off at your expense. Also, all words in Spanish have gender, that doesn't mean all people have to as well.

[-] criitz@reddthat.com 6 points 1 month ago

So would you use Latina or Latino to refer to a non binary person?

[-] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 28 points 1 month ago

In theory? I would use Latino, as in terms of pure grammar this is the correct answer, it's not about the gender of the person, it's about constructing the sentence following appropriate grammar.

In practice? I would just ask what they prefer. Lol

[-] nelly_man@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

But if you were to say that you were Latino or Latina, the sentence would be grammatically correct either way. The only difference is in your gender identity. You have to assign a grammatical gender to yourself to construct the sentence, and that is where your gender identity comes into play.

And that's ultimately the crux of the joke in this post. Somebody says that they are neither masculine nor feminine (i.e. nonbinary). They are then given two choices of words to describe that aspect of themselves and instructed to choose one based on whether they are masculine or feminine.

[-] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

Again, this is only true if you know nothing about Spanish. Saying "Soy una persona latina" says nothing about the gender of the speaker. Males, females and enbys are "personas latinas". So no, you don't need to assign yourself a gender to speak.

My point was: It's an ignorant joke.

[-] nelly_man@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

That's ignoring my point. You introduce the word "persona" in order to describe yourself in a nongendered way. In Spanish, this is necessary because many adjectives need to correspond in gender with the object they are describing. If I'm describing a person directly, I need to assign them to some gender in order to properly form the adjectives.

That is, if I wanted to say precisely that "I am American", not that "I am an American person," I could say either "Soy Americano" or "Soy Americana." The former means that I identify with the masculine grammatical gender, and the latter that I identify with the feminine grammatical gender.

Well, as somebody that identifies as a man, I'd go with the former, but it ends up saying more about myself than the English version of the sentence does. How do I specifically say, "I'm American" without relaying my gender identity or assigning myself to a category such as "person" (well, perhaps I could speak authoritatively to somebody about their native language, and that would be enough to convey the idea). In practice, this doesn't matter, but I'm speaking very narrowly about semantics. Semantically, it's hard to express that concept in Spanish with as little information as I'm able to provide in English. I either have to express my gender (or at the very least, one gender that I do not identify with), or indicate that I'm a person.

[-] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

I mean yeah... You have to use different words if you are communicating different information. Lol.

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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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