[sorenn111]

I sincerely do not intend this observation to be overtly political, BUT I've often wondered about certain very progressive movements having their logical extremes come into conflict. In the US, there's been a movement to remove gender from aspects of language (example, preferring police officer over policeman, business person over businessman). I personally don't really care and re-examining a variety of norms and phrases for entrenched bias makes some sense to me.

Romance languages have gender much more deeply ingrained in the language and present far more challenges in attempting to de-gender them. So, if the progressive attempts to respect the culture of others and be welcoming to different cultures, that can come into conflict with attempting to remove implicit bias that may (or may not) be connected with language (with the claim being that saying businessman inherently discourages non males from pursuing business).

Disclaimer: I'm not very political and align myself largely with moderate democrats with some libertarian sympathies at time. I have nothing against the ideals of re-examining previously held notions for pursuits of greater equality, just an interesting conflict in my opinion with political relevance. I find it fascinating that Trump improved margins with Hispanic voters over past Republicans and I find myself wondering if it wasn't so much about him as aspects of the progressive/democratic movement.

[cfcosta]

As a Latino: it's bullshit. I'm willing to accept the changes you do to your English, it's completely fine, your language your rules.

Trying to change my language is a no-no, in my opinion, and feel dehumanizing, as if my culture isn't "progressive" enough and had to be changed.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Sounds reasonable.

But wait. What happens if a Latino/Latina does this, since then it would be their language too? Is the claim that everyone pushing Latinx is non-Latin?

There are movements afoot in German and French to reduce (long term remove) gender from the language. This isn't just a phenomenon occuring at the conjunction of Spanish and the US.

[plorkyeran]

So you're fine with latinx as long as we're writing in English?

[potatoz2]

The original Latinx idea came from Latino/a non-binary people. The -x suffix is also being pushed in some Latin American countries, like Argentina, by a minority.

Also note that Latino is an American English word now, and it makes sense that it'd evolve on its own independent of the original word in Spanish.

[beepbooptheory]

Could you give more examples of this effort to "remove gender" from language? Both the examples you give, I think, are not replacing words, just preferring more ambiguous words that don't assume a gender. I don't think these things should be political or really all that controversial. The examples you give also do (edit) NOT parallel the same issue with grammatical gender in another language, as we are simply talking about two or three different nouns, not their noun class.