Leftists continue to rename Latinos as Latinx. It is a wildly unpopular move among Latinos. The Pew Research Center found that only 23% of Latinos have heard the term and only 3% choose to use it.
Unfortunately, both former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden chose to kowtow to that 3% rather than abide by the wishes of the mainstream. The State Department, true to form, tries to have it all ways, taking a simple sentence and making it into gobbledygook. “The U.S. government celebrates the countless contributions of more than 60 million Hispanic Americans, Latinos, Latinas, and Latinx-identifying people to our culture and society,” a statement in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month said.
LATINO CANDIDATES FOR CONGRESS MISSED THEIR MOMENT IN MIDTERM ELECTIONS
Driving the efforts to make language gender-neutral is the idea that doing so reduces the marginalization of women. That might sound good in an Ivy League seminar room or on the seventh floor of the State Department, but it also reflects ignorance of both language and culture.
Consider Iran. While Iran is a multilingual society, its lingua franca is Persian (Farsi), a language that does not differentiate gender. True story: during graduate school, our adviser, who would talk to us in Persian and expect us to answer in the language, assumed that one advisee was gay. In a fatherly way, he asked if the male advisee was fitting in, happy, and had a “special friend.” Because pronouns were gender neutral and his other advisees, with purposeful mischievousness, omitted the girlfriend’s name, the professor went several weeks before realizing he had awkwardly misunderstood the situation.
More seriously, with protests fueled by disgust with the regime’s misogyny and Iranian men and women risking their lives under the slogan “women, life, freedom,” it is foolish to believe gender-neutral language to be a precursor for justice or equity in Iran. The truth is that the ideology driving the regime’s hate has nothing to do with gendered language. Or consider Turkey: Turkish is another gender-neutral language. And yet that has not stopped the murder rate of women in the country from increasing by 1,400% since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power.
Simply put, gendered language is irrelevant to the position of women in society. That intersectional liberals do not understand this rests in their fundamental provincialism and their racist assumption that they can amplify their own experience and belief system and impose it on the rest of the world.
Futility of purpose is not the only problem with seeking to retrain cultures to use gender neutrality in language. Stripping gender from language is the cultural equivalent today of the religious iconoclasts of centuries past who would smash statues and deface paintings for perceived violence against the ideologies of the day. Languages evolved in diverse ways. They provide foundations for poetry and literature. To de-gender Spanish or other languages is to delegitimize their written culture and canons. It is time to label those using terms like Latinx what they are: cultural imperialists and racists who disrespect other cultures for ideological reasons. They may not believe their motivation is hate, but then again, those seeking to convert “savages” in indigenous societies would always view their own racism through the lens of altruism.
It is time to retire “Latinx” and school district, activist, and White House efforts to orchestrate and alter language.
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Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
