It's pronounced Latinx. A thread.
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What's more: there hasn't been a word for a collective group of 10 gender nonconforming friends in Spanish. Amigxs, it was explained to me, was a way to include everyone who's in your group of friends.
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Once I understood that, I started hearing and seeing "amigxs" that describe people or groups of people ending in -x more often. It was everywhere. In Spanish. In Latin America. More than 10 years ago.
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When I started seeing and hearing the word Latinx in the U.S., it felt familiar. I was curious at the way the -x had crossed a linguistic border and traveled its way north.
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I work in media, and not all publications accept Latinx. I strive to use it when I can/am allowed to do so. Outside of publications, I sometimes fail to use it in my personal life. When I do, I revert to Latino.
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I've internalized Latino, even though I consciously know it erases me. Language is really deep in that way.
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In the last year or so, a lot of Latino men have very visibly revolted against the term Latinx. These men, who are all from the U.S., explain that *they* don't feel the term represents them. Oh the irony.
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These same Latino men, who never once raised concern over the fact that Latina women like me are made invisible by the word Latino, suddenly feel invisible. Tuh.
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Notice, by the way, that I still refer to myself as Latina. That's because I individually identify as Latina. When I'm in a group, I identify that group as Latinx. Individually, I'm an amiga. My friends? We're amigxs.
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I never perceived Latinx as a threat, the way I think many Latino men do. I get it, in some ways. Latino men are hated in society in so many ways. So you gotta hang on to what you got.
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Nor did I ever presume Latinx to be some kind of imperialistic neologism that we're imposing on older, poorer, and less educated people.
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Again: the person who explained amigxs to me what seems like forever ago was my elder. Poor in a way most of you will never understand poverty, and less educated as in never finished grade school. They got it. They taught me.
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Plus, this is a Guarani elder we're talking about. They reminded me that Spanish is an imperialist language; that we should challenge our allegiance to its purity.
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More than anything else, I'd like those of you who don't speak Spanish and are not Latinx to know that many of us do use the word. We're still working some of this out among ourselves, but in the meantime, we welcome you using the word.
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End of conversation
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Same issue in Arabic- which is also a gendered language.
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the same with German language. And also mens outrage about trying solutions like the -x or using the asterisk (*) etc.
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This happens in French as well. It’s always a male dominant sentence if there’s at least one male involved which is disgusting.
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I'm curious about your position that the -os ending for a mixed-gender group erases you & your gender. How does -xs address that problem? Doesn't it also erase your gender? Or is it better than -os b/c it equally erases both masc. and fem. genders?
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So is this a bad thing?
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