Have you been chastized online yet for using the terms Latina or Latino? I have. It hasn’t happened a lot, but I’ve been seeing increasing use of the term LatinX and critics attempting to correct those who fail to use it. The traditional terms are now apparently some bizarre combination of racism and sexism simultaneously according to the Woke Patrol. But how do actual Hispanic citizens feel about it? The Free Beacon dug up a recent survey that sampled voters in Florida as well as nationally. The results weren’t even close to any sort of balanced split. Hispanic voters widely prefer the term Hispanic and “LatinX” was the first choice for almost nobody.
Just 1 percent of Hispanic Democratic voters in Florida prefer the term “Latinx,” the gender-free alternative to “Latino” and “Latina” that has been embraced by several liberal groups and top Democratic politicians, according to a new poll.
The poll, shared Monday by Politico‘s Marc Caputo, surveyed 800 Hispanic Democrats in Florida and found the preferred label is still “Hispanic,” the primary choice of 69 percent of respondents. Twenty-three percent said they preferred “Latino,” 9 percent said they had no preference, and 1 percent said they preferred “Latinx,” an attempt to remove the gender forms inherent in the Spanish language.
Support for “Latinx” among Hispanic Florida Democrats is even lower than its support among Hispanics nationally—just 2 percent of respondents to a nationwide poll conducted last November identified “Latinx” as their preferred term.
This push to remove the concept of gender from all speech isn’t a popular one for the most part, but it’s particularly significant for Spanish speakers. The idea crosses cultural and linguistic lines. I still recall taking Spanish in high school and struggling with the concept that virtually everything has a gender associated with it, not just people or animals. A shoe store is la zapatería because it’s feminine. A traditional hat is el sombrero because it’s male. And you had to learn the gender of all the things in the language instead of just memorizing the base words.
Attempting to strip gender out of the Spanish language is a cultural affront. Small wonder then that only one to two percent of Hispanic people are excited about being referred to as “LatinX” to avoid making any assumptions about their gender.
This isn’t much different than the somewhat more successful efforts of our Woke Betters to try to force everyone to use a “singular they” to refer to people rather than he or she. They’ve been so intrusive on this point that Merriam-Webster caved in and put “singular they” in the dictionary and went on to declare it their word of the year.
English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.
More recently, though, they has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers. There’s no doubt that its use is established in the English language, which is why it was added to the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary this past September.
Feel free to make your language as woke as you please, but don’t bother trying to force it on everyone else. The use of “they” as a third-person pronoun is simply stupid and makes you sound illiterate. I have no plans to start using it at this point in my life and the same goes for LatinX. And based on the results of this survey, you probably shouldn’t try to force the people “LatinX” describes to use it either. You might find yourself on the receiving and of a puñetazo in la nariz.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member