Hi, I have a question about language and gender. I know you’ve said a lot of times that English is a very gendered language, but I’m learning Spanish and WOW. That language is so gendered it isn’t even funny. The thing that I’ve been wondering about is how a language like Spanish (or any Latin-based language, really) could ever be altered to fit non-binary genders. With the gendered articles, adjectives, nouns, pronouns, etc., it seems impossibly difficult! What are your thoughts?

anagnori:

I figure that the main goal for handling non-binary genders should be to develop gender-neutral speech. We can add in categories for specific non-binary identities, too, but those will take more time and work to popularize. Wikipedia has a couple articles on gender-neutrality in Spanish and Portuguese, and in other languages. I can’t vouch for how accurate those articles are, because my Spanish is rusty, but they at least contain some suggestions.

Be warned that, as I’m only fluent in English, this post is gonna be Anglocentric, and there’s a lot of ideas and opinions going on in other language communities that I won’t be able to mention here. This post is not as thorough, multicultural or well-informed as it should be, and I apologize for that.

Grammatical gender isn’t a bad thing per se. (It has some pretty cool uses for syntax and parsing, in fact.) The problem arises when there’s no easy way to talk about people in a gender-neutral manner. One way to handle this is to create (or bring back) a neutral gender category:

• El, ella, elle
• Los, las, les
• Latino, Latina, Latin@

Another option is to coin a new set of vocabulary terms that are explicitly gender-neutral from the start. English does this a lot, and you might be able to adapt it for Spanish by specifying that the noun overrides the gender of the article/adjectives used with it.

• Stewardess —> flight attendant
• Chairman —> chair, chairperson

A more difficult idea is to get rid of grammatical gender entirely. This happened in Old English, which originally had masculine, feminine and neuter genders, and they appeared in nouns, adjectives and articles, sort of like how Spanish is today. English lost its grammatical genders because of sound changes that eroded the gender-suffixes from words. It took about 300 years, and it had huge ramifications on other parts of English’s grammar.

You could try to replicate this in other languages, but I don’t recommend it. It’s almost impossible to invoke sound changes intentionally, and you’re likely to run into weird grammar or pronunciation issues.

Another idea is to take one (or more) of the grammatical genders and reassign it as neutral. This would be easy to do in Spanish, since the masculine gender is used for mixed-gender groups a lot, but it would also piss off a lot of people, and it ties into arguments about masculine being treated as the default or normal category. I don’t think this one is feasible, and even if it was, it’s not really fair to ask that of people.

Anyway, that’s all I got. I’m optimistic about the future of Spanish and other languages for their non-binary speakers. It may take longer to deal with all the ways gender is reflected in the grammar, but language is a tool, and it changes to reflect the needs of its speakers.

I have a friend who uses ele (I think cause elle looks like the french feminine? or possibly to come down more on the masculine side than elle looks/sounds. éle or élle would maybe be other ways of envoking the ideas of the two with different conotations?)

For direct object pronouns they use lo or la but always specify with a ele after the verb. that’s kind of usual anyway if you need to be clear or emphasize something (kind of works for either idea, but lo or la can also mean you so its needed more with those ones anyway – not sure thats the case in south america though?) 

indirect object third person le is already neutral so no problems there (other than if you replace lo/la directs with le it becomes really confusing)

some bits of rephrasing happens but its workable 

(their other first language is catalan and I’m not sure if they can do anything there, i suspect that it might be very hard for them to explain to me who doesn’t know any catalan (past ‘hello’ ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry i dont speak catalan’ anyway) hw it works there)

Edit: I forgot the disclaimer that my spanish is not very good, this is how I construct my spanish for them within the confines of my knowledge of the language, I’m copying others and going on what they’ve said to use for them but I could be getting some stuff wrong, and given that a air portion of my spanish will be ‘we got what you meant’ some of how i navigate this might come under that cause i’m not a native speaker