It's Transphobic to Not Use the Word "Latinx" Or Something

My just Shaman sent me this story from David Strom.

At the San Francisco Chronicle, a trans extremist claims:

The debate over the use of Latinx (and more recently, Latine, which I prefer) to refer to people with origins in Latin America has become a source of fierce disagreements among Latine people of all races, ages, genders and sexual identities.

But the debates largely miss the point: Whether one prefers to use Latinx or Latine, both terms recognize and honor the presence of gender-fluid identities. What is most striking about these "debates" is that they rarely (if ever) center the voices and experiences of the transgender, nonbinary and gender-fluid Latine people who do identify with the term.

The linguistic debate on Latinx, then, serves as a useful example to understand the transphobia prevalent in our community and the importance of adopting language that better reflects our communities writ large.

A constant source of lunatic strife from the wokies is over the pseudo-academic concept of "centering." If I use the ordinary words "man" and "woman," which are so ordinary because they accord so completely with actual physical reality, then I am "centering" the "gender binary" in my language. I am "privileging" one particular view of the world with my word choice.

The view of the world I am "centering" happens to be the real, actual, non-lunatic view of the world in which all people are either men or women, except, arguably, for the 0.01% who are actual hermaphrodites. (But note that even that tiny fraction of actual hermaphrodites is usually raised as a particular sex or chooses to live as a sex, and so are either men or women.)

A tiny, tiny percentage of the world's population thinks that gender is complicated and "fluid" and "non-binary," and this tiny fraction of almost-exclusively mentally-ill people resents the fact that gender and sex are so uncomplicated and straightforward for practically everyone, and so insists with toxic manic energy that we take on their bizarre psychology and see the world through their screwed-up eyes and also see sex as complicated and "fluid" and "binary" and polymorphous and multiplicitous and ever-changing. To force this perspective on us, they want us to stop using words which "center" this sort of thing, and substitute words that force their style of thinking on us.

That's why they're so insistent not just that we use their pronouns, but that we announce our pronouns as well. They want us to pretend that our sex is also constructed, false, artificial, and non-obvious so that we, too, just like the transsexuals, must wear badges announcing our pronouns otherwise other people wouldn't know what gender we were.

You see? They're trying to force us into thinking like them. They want us to stop thinking with our lived experiences and assumptions and substitute their lived experiences and assumptions.

If they live lives in which they feel uncomfortable about gender and embarrassed when they have to tell people their pronouns, they want us to feel uncomfortable about gender and embarrassed when they have to tell people our pronouns.

The attempt to hijack the word "Latino" and substitute the word "Latinx" is similar: "Latinx" is the transgender version of Latinx. Are tyey suggest using Latinx only Latin transgenders? No, of course not, their ambitions are not so small. They want to "center" the transgender experience in everyone's minds. They want Lantinx used for all Latinos -- they want you to think of transgenders first and foremost when you think of Latinos.

Transgenders must be "centered" in your mind whenever you think of a Hispanic American person. Again, they demand that you see the world as they see it. Transgenders see the world as trans-centric; normal, non-trans people must also see the world as trans-centric.

They claim that they just want to be "inclusive" with "Latinx" but that's a lie, of course; "Latino" is already inclusive. "Latino" includes everyone; the -o ending in Spanish is both masculine and neuter and unknown/both in gender. So it's already the "trans" ending.

But they made up "Latinx" specifically so you'd think of transgenders only when you spoke about Latinos.

This person writing in the SF Chronicle gives it away; you must use the term Latinx to speak of any and all Latinos. Why? To "recognize and honor those of gender-fluid identities." Not to use a neutral word that is inclusive of all people, but to specifically call out transgenders and non-binaries and "honor" them.

If the -os at the end of Latinos was so gendered and offensive, there was an easy fix to remove that horrible gendering vowel: We could just call Latinos "Latins." In fact, we often do call them that, even if that's not quite right according to the Spanish language itself. It's a degendered word that speaks about everyone.

Now you can say "But that's not a real Spanish word!" Well, neither is "Latinx" or its proposed new substitute "Latine."

But of course those are urged precisely because they are intended to "center" transgenders first and foremost, which the common "Latin" would not.

People are getting increasingly sick of the increasingly petulant and outrageous demands from the allegedly Most Oppressed People On Earth. Oppressed People are not forever making demands on others, and not over things like pronouns and group nouns for people. Those are the sorts of things that highly, highly privileged people have the luxury of making demands about.

Trans people used to make requests on the grounds of "politeness." They wished to be treated as the gender they "present" as, and it's just polite to accede to their wishes, isn't it?

Well we are now hell and gone from mere ephemeral social-situation politeness. We are now re-architecting language and culture and society entirely to accommodate a tiny, ever-demanding minority of people who need cognitive behavioral therapy so that they can accommodate themselves to how society views them. The current regime whereby all of society undergoes cognitive behavioral therapy so that we can change how we see reality to see the same delusionary version of that they see is not going to to work, so trans people and their advocates need to stop prescribing this insane prescription to the 330 million people in this country who do not have dysphoria and start prescribing therapy for the several million who do have it.

Start by making the patient understand and internalize that this is his or her affliction to bear, not society's.

And as these demands get more insane -- insistence that straight men must accept "trans girl's" "feminine penises" in their mouths or else they're "transphobes," for example, or that little girls are just going to have to get over their inborn revulsion at seeing an adult male penis in the changing rooms -- the rejections of it are going to become increasingly impolite and direct.

posted by Ace at 06:12 PM

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