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.
My mind jumped straight to "it's-a me! Binario!"
We default to "binario" since it's technically the gender-neutral form but some people deliberately change it to "binaria", "binarie" or "binarix" to make a statement.
Relevant Tom Scott: https://youtu.be/46ehrFk-gLk?si=wFaP44sc5np2JICW
Pretty much you need a lobotomy to finally understand their fkin craziness. I don't even entertain their mental gymnastics anymore. All anyone has to ask is, "what is a woman?"
And if they cannot shoot from the hip with the right answer, just walk away, they literally belong in a mental institute. Whether they're inflicted with the crazy or they are the supporter/promoter for the crazies.
through thorough thought, yadda yadda.
What I don't understand is that as soon as you start criticizing other languages for similar absurdities you're gonna get a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork to defend it. People are fine to shit on english for being a horrible language, and I'm fine with that as well because that's true, but as soon as you criticize spanish, i.e. another language that spread to everywhere because of colonialism, you're gonna get dogpiled about how everything is getting forced from the outside by non-native spanish speakers and how it's all so artificial and astroturfed. But then they also don't acknowledge these calls whenever they have come from inside the house, which is something that's always happening, and they also won't do anything really to refute the core logic of the critique outside of what's basically just prescriptivism.
I dunno, maybe it's just because the british have sucked the fun out of everything and american imperialism has kind of given english generally a bad reputation among all of the south american countries which would generally speak spanish, and so that's going to lead to a kind of resistance to anything seen as coming in from there, which is fair enough.
The bigger problem I have, though,, which also applies to english, is how ineffective any of these more academic strategies for change are, even if they're mostly well-intentioned. You see this outside of language, too. As long as we're not making some institutional change, then no progress is gonna be made because people will see it all as artificial ivory tower bullshit, and won't wanna use it. For english, it would have to be taught in school as part of a base level curriculum, and if you're trying to grassroots it, then it'll have to be explained every time you use it, with every new person, which impedes communication in literal terms and means it probably won't get picked up.
What's weird to me is that we can't have that, and implicitly there can kind of be nothing that challenges the informal rules or structure of language, so no major shakeups are allowed, but still somehow we'll see every kid on tiktok every two weeks start to accumulate some form of AAVE and then proceed to completely drive it into the ground. I guess that's just because the internet is kind of a chaotic place and these things are primed to propagate pretty easily, but it's kind of frustrating how totally undirected it all is, and how it all preys on our worst instincts. Means we get people that can only talk in buzzwords and call everything woke without having any formal definition for what that means really. I wonder how fast you could artificially change someone's mind for the better if that's what you actually wanted to do with social media. That maybe sounds villainous or manipulative, but I think we have to understand that this is something that exists and has always existed with these platforms, and by ignoring it, we just let the worst instincts and actors take over and fester instead.
