Oh boy.

"LatinX" was indeed the first attempt at a gender neutral description. "Latino" is still considered by many native speakers to be "neutral", but the most feasible solution I've seen popping up is the "latine" (as in "estudiante", "vigilante", etc). Since it uses an explicitly non-gendered suffix, it is more correctly inclusive than the "latino". It will take a while though, und until it is really widely adopted.

Am I the only one who reads LatinX as rhyming with larynx?

How many of them are actually Latino though? It seems like a term created and made popular by white liberals

Rent free

So far it isn’t as bad as I feared. It’s very early days though! I’m really keen to create a community where we can discuss any topic including contentious ones respectfully, rather than just avoiding posting anything that could bring out the trolls. I’m hoping the one-warning-then-you’re-banned rule will be sufficient to keep the worst at bay. Please report comments that break the rules if you see them to help keep this community an enjoyable place to be!

I'm pretty sure that as a white person I'm aloud to call out a type of behavior that has become all to common in white people.

Not to mention I think making the One Joke should be a bannable offense, personally

I feel triggered, not as a trans person, but as someone who enjoys humor

"This is my warning. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My warning is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. ..."

Hispanic is if you come from a country of spanish descent. Latino is if you come from a Latin American country. People from Brazil are latinos but not hispanic.

Half of my family is spanish speaking. My mom grew up bilingual, speaking Spanish at home with my grandma. I lived in Spanish-speaking countries in my twenties for a while and learned to speak spanish myself.

…I still never ever call myself Latino because I grew up in whitesville as a white kid. It never even occurred to me until I was older that I might technically be considered Latino. It just never really came up. The most I ever say is literally what I said in the first sentence. I really feel like deciding later in life to identify as Latino would be some weird kind of appropriation. I don’t look Latino, I didn’t experience anything like a Latino outside of visiting my family and being surrounded by Latinos.

I’ve come across people in very similar situations to me, who do identify as Latin and they explained to me that they decided later in life to start saying it. It just feels…wrong to me. Can you find out after living a super white existence that you may get to qualify as a minority group (in the context of living in the US, that is.) I say no.

I followed the link you used:

These standards generally reflect a social definition of race and ethnicity recognized in this country, and they do not conform to any biological, anthropological, or genetic criteria. . . . Persons who report themselves as Hispanic can be of any race and are identified as such in our data tables.

I thought the OP was ridiculous but apparently, if they genuinely identify with the culture then she might technically be correct.

So the definition of what "Latino" is comes from... the US institutions?

It's more complicated than that. Latinos in the US also have Native American blood (usually South American). They have a terrible history of persecution. Someone who's from Spain isn't "Latino".