Being gender neutral in Spanish
Being gender neutral in Spanish
In Spanish everything is gendered, so being gender neutral is not as easy as for example English where you can just use 'they' or 'them'.
Sometimes people use the 'e' instead of the o/a (which often mark the gender of words, for example gato/gata, cat in Spanish) but it can't always be used and it just sounds really weird for a lot of people, though that might just be because it is barely used.
The other way to be gender neutral that I know is to say both the male and female versions of the word you are trying to make gender neutral, for example "trabajadores y trabajadoras" (workers[M] and workers[F]) but it's also not ideal as you have to say one of the genders first and it is pretty inconvenient to have to do that every time you refer to a group of people that is not guaranteed to be composed of one gender only.
Anyway thanks for reading my post and I hope I find out about a better way to be gender neutral in Spanish.
At least in Spanish there is never doubt how shit is pronounced, unlike in English. (Fuck English all my homies hate the English language)
I feel that, German is the same. Speaking gender neutrally is excessively wordy and easy to mess up, especially as a non native speaker. And even if you are successful, ignorant people look at you funny or even try to call you out for using more inclusive phrasing.
At least when communicating through writing I've also seen adding the symbol "@" at the end of the words (like amig@s = amigos and amigas) to make them gender neutral, but this obviously is binary and doesn't take non-binary people into account. And only works with writing. I do prefer the 'e' at the end of words for this reason and it also sounds/looks better than adding X, but Spanish isn't my primary language. Would be interesting to hear other people's thoughts.
I don't have Spanish as my first language but my first language is pretty related to Spanish and s also gendered and I personally hate all those alternatives. The @ and the X thing can't be read by screen readers so these options aren't inclusive at all, also this is pretty confusing for dyslexic people...
I personally think this is a case where people just have to understand that grammatical gender is not the same as social gender, even words like milk and chair are grammatically gendered, so don't make sense to Try to say there's any hidden message using the masculine or feminine form of the words...
There's also the option to end words with an E instead of an A or O. And to use Elle instead of El or Ella. It's not very widespread and far from standard, but it takes time for language reform this big to stick. So far I think the only popular word that uses the E suffix is Latine (aside from the words that already existed like estudiante)