The "Latinx" controversy is interesting for different reasons than you think

In recent years, if you’ve been online (or listened to NPR, or watched the news on TV), you’ve no doubt come across the term latinx. It’s intended to replace latino in Spanish (and English), and is ostensibly a remedy for the gendered — and presumably therefore non-inclusive — nature of latino. Proponents argue that it is inclusive of people other than men and the x is more inclusive than @, which is inclusive of men and women, but not nonbinary and other people (usually, on twitter, folx). Detractors argue that it is unpronounceable ( Latin-equis? Latinks? Latin-eks, which is explicitly English?), and could lead to unpronounceable and uninterpretable language (“lxs personxs sxn humanxs”), and is an English imposition on Spanish that isn’t used or liked by 97% of Spanish speakers in the US.

I try to respect people’s language, culture, and self-determination, so I don’t really care one way or the other, and if the people I’m speaking to prefer latinx I’ll use it however they pronounce it. This is what linguists call “audience design”, and regular people call “being nice” and it helps you get along with people. I think people are, in general, so busy trying to prove that latinx is wrong (or right!) that they are missing what’s actually interesting about it:

The new gender-inclusive language in Spanish respects an animacy distinction.

More specifically, it’s between human and non-human nouns (and derived nouns). So people are busy arguing about latinxs, and amigxs, and personxs, but nobody is talking about xl librx instead of el libro ‘the book’. Actually, this isn’t entirely true, as I’ve seen it extended to pets, as in algunx de mis perrxs ‘one of my dogs’ and mis gatxs ‘my cats’. That said, animals who have different names for the sexes (e.g., a bull and a cow) aren’t included (that’s not to say you can’t find lxs vacxs, but it’s only used to dunk on gender inclusive language from PETA, as far as I can tell). So the line is not human/non-human, but it’s definitely pretty close — perhaps humans and pets, but not domesticated animals.

To a linguist, this is genuinely interesting (or rather, should be, but I haven’t seen any linguists discuss this yet. That may be that I’m just following the wrong linguists online). So to the extent that people are actually using this language in Spanish, they are creating a three gender system with masculine, feminine, and animate genders, it triggers agreement in other words (like algunx), and we get to watch it develop in real time. This is super cool! We know that the masculine/feminine distinction in Romance languages, if you go far enough back, originated as an animacy distinction (I mean really far back). We know that masculine/feminine/neuter gave way to two non-sexed genders in Dutch (masculine and feminine collapsed into one, leaving a common/neuter distinction). But we might actually have the opportunity to watch a language develop an animacy distinction in nouns and pronouns over a generation or two, in real time, and that’s truly exciting. And what’s interesting is not that it’s “ruining Spanish” but rather — how does this work for direct object and indirect object marking? What about indirect object pronouns for animate indirect objects (as in, les escribe una carta a sus amigos — should we expect the non-gender-marking, but plural-marking le and les to begin to respect a gender distinction between animate on hand and masculine/feminine on another, as in lxs escribe una carta a sus amigxs?). Is this primarily a written distinction? For whom and in what instances is it not?

So, my takeaways are:

1. latinx is genuinely linguistically interesting, but not because of the anger and vitriol over gender, but rather because that social conflict may give rise to a new grammatical system, and

2. It’s not hard to be nice, and sometimes it’s better to choose to be nice than to try to prove that you’re right. So why not be nice?

Of course, if anyone knows of linguistic work on these topics I would love to read it. In the mean time, I can sum this all up with: quit yelling at each other and pay attention to how interesting what is really happening actually is!

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©Taylor Jones 2020

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Gender, Gender, Gender

A good Question:

I'm still getting a surprising number of comments and emails about the short post I wrote on David Peterson's slip up with grammatical gender. While most are incoherent and silly (and have a seasonally and statistically unlikely preponderance of the use of the word "snowflake"), there is one in particular that seemed earnest, and that I think warrants a full response. Brele asked:

Taylor, can u help me understand how there are more than two genders? I ask just having watched J. Peterson on a YouTube show and hearing his thoughts on the matter.

I think it's important here to distinguish three related phenomena, and where they do and don't overlap: biological sex, gender (and gender expression), and grammatical gender. The conflation of biological sex with gender, and the subsequent conflation of grammatical gender with both, is where most of the confusion and anger comes from, I think.

Biological Sex:

Biological sex is what it sounds like: the biological properties we associate with sexual reproduction in a species. We assume that there are two sexes in humans: male, and female. This is not strictly true, as biological sex is determined by a constellation of factors, among them:

• chromosomes: while we're familiar with XX as female and XY as male, there are people with XXY, or other unusual (but extant!) combinations. Roughly 1:1666 births have atypical chromosomal combinations. That's roughly 210,000 Americans.

• gonads: most people have reproductive organs that fall broadly into one of the two expected categories, but again, not all people do. Roughly 1:1500 births have atypical gonads (which means about 230,000 Americans).

• hormones: some people have atypical hormonal patterns. For instance, the sikh woman who has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and therefore has a full beard.

The vast majority of people will have phenotypes that 'line up', but a sizeable minority don't. So what we think of as physically binary -- male/female -- is, in reality, a bit more complicated than that, but generally true. Not always true.

Gender and Sexuality:

Gender, in the social sciences, is distinct from biological sex. It is also a complicated constellation of factors, including:

• who you are attracted to.

• how you physically present yourself, and how you behave, according to (or going against) culturally defined patterns of behavior. For instance "boys wear blue, girls wear pink" is a completely arbitrary, culturally defined dichotomy with no basis in biology, and which is absolutely not universal.

• How masculine or feminine (or neither, or both or whatever) you personally feel. That is, maybe I feel really girly (whatever that means, just go with it), but I don't present myself in accordance with that because it's easier to just follow my culture's rules about What Men Do than it is to deal with people's reactions if I start wearing dresses.

• a bunch of other stuff I'm probably leaving out.

The key here is that gender is about how you feel, behave, and are attracted to, and is not about your chromosomes, gonads, and hormones.

For a more science-y take: there are multiple parameters, which may be either binary or have multiple levels, along which people can vary continuously. This is a high-dimensional space that we generally try to collapse to a single-dimensional sub-space to then classify with a binary score. Increasingly, people who are hard to classify on that one dimension (studs, bears, beardos, genderqueer, agender, genderfluid [do we need a time dimension?], flannel-heads, balloon-poppers -- yes, I made some of these up, but not the balloon one) are saying you can't collapse things to a single binary parameter, but you night a higher dimensional space to accurately categorize people without losing important information.

Grammatical Gender:

This is how languages group nouns. The name is an unfortunate misnomer, given the conflation of the above two things -- it's etymologically related to genre and that's probably a much better way to think of it. Some languages have two genders, which they call masculine and feminine because noun classes in those languages sort of line up with how actual masculine people and feminine people are classified grammatically. That said, in one such language, French, there's no clear reason a table should be semantically feminine. The genre of the noun just happens to be the same as for women, but in this case it's largely a phonological thing, not a semantic (i.e., meaning) thing. Moreover, some words come in gendered pairs: le tour 'the tour' (as in, the tour of france), versus la tour 'the tower' (as in, the Eiffel Tower). 

In other languages, there are two genders, but they don't line up with sex: Dutch has two genders, but they're common and neuter. Both man 'man' and vrauw 'woman' are common, and meisje 'girl' is neuter (along with all other diminitives, so mannetje 'little man' is also neuter).

In other languages, there are more than two genders. German and Russian have masculine, feminine, and neuter.

In yet other languages, there are many more genders: Zulu has 14, and none of them have anything to do with sex. Some are for humans, some are for long, stick-y things (although there's arguments about this), and one is for abstract concepts: umu-ntu is a person, aba-ntu is 'people' (whence "Bantu"), and ubu-ntu is the quality of being human (personhood, or humanity).

Finally, many languages mark all nouns and noun-y things with gender, but many don't. English, for instance, only explicitly marks gender on some pronouns (he and she, but not you), and a handful of nouns for kinds of people ("actress").

The Takeaway:

"Gender" is often interchangeably used to mean any of three things: biological sex, sexual(ity) gender, and grammatical gender. Moreover, each of these things is complex, and non-binary (although biological sex comes close to being binary in everyday life for most people).

English obligatorily marks gender on third person singular pronouns (and that's about it). This gender marking generally overlaps with biological sex and 'mainstream' gender expressions related to cultural assumptions about biological sex. People who do not feel like they are necessarily well described by he or she have been asking to be referred to with a different term -- many ask that we use they, which has the benefits of (1) already existing in English, and (2) being gender neutral already. Others ask for ze or something else. 

The point is, marking gender on third person singular pronouns (only) is a weird quirk of the grammatical structure of English, and not representative of objective biological reality, and certainly not reflective of culture. My comments on David Peterson's remarks were solely to laugh at the irony of someone claiming they refused to use gender-neutral pronouns while using gender neutral they to express that contrarianism.

Hopefully, the above answered the question of how there could be 'more than two genders.'

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©Taylor Jones 2016

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More on Pronouns: Are Gender Creative People Really All That Creative?

Controversy is still swirling around trans, non-binary, and other "gender creative" people's occasional insistence on being referred to with pronouns of their choice. I have been thinking about this lately, and while some people are very upset that others are asking for specific pronouns the speaker may disagree with ("But you're a he, not a she!") I've come to the conclusion that the gender creatives are really not being all that creative at all. 

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of people who are requesting "special" pronouns are doing one of two things: 

1. Asking to be referred to with the pronouns appropriate to the gender they identify as (whether it's immediately apparent to others or not). That is, hypothetically, someone born female asking to be referred to in the third person with he, him, his, himself. No other changes to the pronominal system.

2. Asking to be referred to with a gender neutral third person pronoun, usually either they (which has a long history of use for gender neutral, but nonspecific, third person), or some variation on Xe, Ze, or something else pronounced with a voiced coronal sibilant. (/z/). No other changes to the pronominal system.

The thing is, the languages of the world do a lot of really interesting things with pronouns, and these so-called gender creatives are clearly not being creative enough. It's almost as though they're not playing with language at all, but are actually trying to conform to the rules of English while insisting others respect their gender identity. 

Here are some things they could be doing, and places where I think they're really dropping the ball:

• Gendering pronouns other than the third person. Arabic has gendered second person singular and plural pronouns. Instead of just "you" referring to anyone you're talking with, Modern Standard Arabic has anti, anta, antum, antunna, for "you (male)", "you (female)", "you men," and "you women" respectively.

• Proximal and Distal third person pronouns. Algonkian languages tend to differentiate between, say, 'he (who is nearby)' and 'he (who is far from us),' which can then send social signals -- if I talk about you in front of you, but use the him (distal) form, I'm pretty rudely implying that this is an A/B conversation (and you can C your way out).

• More case marking. English really only has nominative/oblique/possessive pronouns. Other languages do a lot more. I'd love to be able to say that I identify as male, but my pronouns are he/him/his/hig/hif/hird for nominative, oblique, possessive, ablative (motion towards me), instrumental (using me to do something or doing something accompanied by me), and locative (doing something where I am). Russian and Latin have us beat by like 3 cases, and Hungarian is blowing us out of the water.

• Marking tense on the pronoun. Wolof, for instance, marks differences in tense not on the verb, but on the pronoun. This allows meeting the gender...uncreative?... half way: "You can use the pronoun for males when referring to me only if it's got past tense morphology on it."

So yes, at your request I will call you ze/zim/zis, but know that I'm silently judging you for your cliché, unimaginative pronouns, and wishing you'd give me a real challenge. It's almost like this isn't about language at all, but just about asking for me to respect your life choices and identity.

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©Taylor Jones 2016

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