#plus now i have a feminine name AND a masculine name (little known fact: i'm very genderfluid)

[continuousmeowing]

i'm an official* middle name haver now!!!!

[whoaffle]

Honestly this is what happens when a bunch of people who never had to use actually gendered language try to use the X. Most English speakers that don't speak a second language (at least not a Latin language, which are the languages I believe use the X system most) don't know how gender occurs in language.

My main focus here will be Latin languages, but I believe this applies to most Indo-European languages... Thing is, gender doesn't occur in language with the addition of "man" to it. That is not how gender happens. Gender in latin languages happens with a little "o" or "a" at the end of a word. French can be more complicated, but it's still not just going "masculine nouns have "homme" in them and feminine have "femme" in them :)". Here's a link with some terminations that are typically feminine or masculine in French, if you wanna check out.

Sometimes, gender in language is an article that goes "ie" instead of "er" or "as", like in German... in Russian, you'll often have consonant versus "a" at the end of a name, but "yi" versus "aya" for adjectives. Plus, Russian, as well as German, have neutral genders in their language too, but Latin languages usually do not (although Latin as a language used to have neutral words), meaning that for Spanish or Portuguese, every noun will have a feminine or masculine gender.

Ok sure, in English, a profession may have something like "policeMAN" and "policeWOMAN", but that's not how it goes for most nouns in languages with linguistic gender. Meaning that in English, this is not how it would go as well. In English, "gendered language" occurs when you assume a "he" in a sentence that never specified the gender of the person, for example. Or by going "Men have known math since pre-historic times", instead of saying "humans" or "people". Or going "men and women" while ignoring other genders. And with the few words where "man" actually stands for "human male", like chairman, policeman, freshman, etc. But I swear to god, seeing the letters 'm', 'a' and 'n' in that order in a word doesn't automatically mean "oh gendered language". You just don't know shit about how gendered language works.

And I'll prove you that you don't: gender in language is not in fact the same concept of gender as gender in people. And you may be going "What are you talking about??" right now, but it's true. Gender in nouns, in general, has nothing to do with gender in humans. It is a declension of the language, and the fact that it is used for one or another human sex is what made us go "so this is feminine, since we use it for women". Arguments to my point are:

1- many languages like Finnish or Armenian don't have multiple genders, they only have 1 that goes for all. And yeah I'm talking pronouns and articles too, not just nouns. You don't have "he or she", you have "hän" (Finnish) and it goes for anyone. So how would linguistic gender be associated with identity gender? Was everyone in Finland non-binary? No. It's just two separate things. Does that mean sexism doesn't exit in Finland? No. It's two separate things.

2- Just like that, some words have more than two genders, like Russian and German, as I mentioned before. And considering the western erasure or non-binaries until recently, I wouldn't say it was simply because they decided to make a pronoun for enbies too. It is because, out of the three possible "gender" declensions, two of them started to be used as the one for the male sex and the one for the female sex, so they became the "feminine and masculine" ones and the remaining one was called nautral.

3- Two different languages may have completely different genders for a same noun. That's because there is nothing inherently "feminine or masculine" (as in the social expectations of gender, or as in gender presentation or expression) in a specific object. The fact that the word "cadeira" (chair) is feminine in my native language doesn't mean Brazilians look at a chair and go "oh yeah that's a woman, give her a little dress, thats a girl right there ahah, this chair is so femme". No. It doesn't mean that when we see a talking chair on a TV show and it has a masculine voice we will go "whoooa that's wrong, all chairs are girls!! >:(". Because the "gender" for that object is just a linguistic declension. It could be called "gender 1 and gender 2". But we call it based on which of them is also used when referring to a specific human gender. Source: my Etymology and Morphology professor, Mário Eduardo Viaro, at University of São Paulo (USP), back when I was graduating Language Arts school as a bachelor in Portuguese and Russian language and literature.

4- finally, the fact the word is the same (gender), doesn't mean it has the same meaning. For example, in my language, "genre" (for music or movies or etc) is the same word as "gender": "Gênero". That doesn't mean songs have a feminine or masculine gender, or that humans can be male, female, non-binary, country, k-pop, classical, rock, punk, electronic, etc... (here, fun new genders for you all). So the fact that we use the words "gender", "masculine" or "feminine", in a linguistic context, doesn't mean these words have the exact same semantic meaning as when we use it in a social context.

Sure that doesn't mean language cannot be used as a TOOL for sexism, or that gendered language is not at all an issue. Gendered language is an issue when gender in a language is used as a tool for oppression, either by making up new meanings for words OR by perpetuating harmful notions associated with it. Language can be aggressive as hell, when used with that intent, thats why misgendering is such a serious issue, for example. And sure, using gender neutral language and coming up with gender neutral alternatives is excellent - but you need to understand gender in language before doing that, otherwise you're gonna do this kind of crap, like the post above. Language is gendered when it refers to a person of a specific gender, like a male human. That's when you should think "oh hey, maybe instead of talking about one gender, I should be neutral, to avoid assumptions or sexist generalizations."

And since we're at here: the usage of X as the main neutral language alternative is bad. It is bad for several reasons:

1- It is ableist. It makes it harder for people with dyslexia or reading disabilities in general to understand written language.

2- it is "speaker-unfriendly". No one knows how to pronounce these Xs, they are not easily translated into speech, which is the main form of language and the form in which actual changes to language happen. If you want something to happen in language, it needs to be something you can easily pronounce.

3- As combo from 1 and 2, it is also ableist towards people with visual disabilities, as screen readers can't actually read the X in words (because of point 2).

So even when it comes to fighting the negative aspects of gendered language, resorting to any replacement like X or @ won't do it. Language evolves slowly and demanding that everyone will immediately adhere to the first written system thrown at them is absurd. As the demand for neutral language grows, the tendency is that it will naturally evolve and adapt to encompass enbies and to become more inclusive, but this is a slow process that has to take all kinds of speakers into account. Making up that "now you cannot say german" and fighting over it on discord doesn't make you a hero. It just shows your lack of understanding of every fucking layer involved in this discussion.

Besides, I might go as far as suggesting that this sort of generalizations and problematizations of linguistic gender and of some specific letter combinations might even do more harm than good. As stated above, what are the implications of assuming "human" doesn't encompass enbies? By creating that bizarre association, are we not weaponizing originally neutral words, giving free ammo for bigots? If we all start going "oh human doesn't include NBs", we'll allow bigots to say NBs aren't human or are some different kind of human. By demanding everyone uses "humxn", we are giving an opportunity for bigots to turn the very name of our species into an exclusionist term and to distort its meaning into an exclusionist one. This is insane!

Basically. Language is not bigoted by default. We can weappnize it or not based on how we use it and interpret it. Linguistic gender is not an enemy, it is just a tool that can be used positively or negatively, and trying to eliminate it is far-fetched to say the least. To be able to deal with the negative effects of gendered language, you need to understand the basics of what "gender" means in a linguistic context and when it does or does not imply a social gender exclusion. When it refers to a human gender or sex. It's not about throwing in an algorithm that detects every sequence of M A N and censors it or exchanges it by an M X N.

Sorry for the long text, it's an area of interest. Have a cute butterfly pic:

are we really doing this