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Comment by houstonn | Hacker News Reader

It's not even accommodation to small minorities, it's accommodation to an ideology. Activists push this conflation to make it appear about minorities and not their ideology. They present it as though minorities all have the same opinion and then weaponize your compassion to get compliance.

"Oh, this is what minorities want. Ok, I'm a good person, I want to respect their wishes."

What you may not realize is that many gay and trans people strongly disagree with gender ideology and do not want this.

Indeed, they don't all have the same opinion!

The loud, aggressive, too online activists do not speak for everyone.

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Yes, exactly.

I’m involved with several gay organizations - one professional and one centered around gay athletics.

In both cases there are a small group of activists that are trying to erase gay and lesbian identity, and all mentions of gender, from the org to be more trans- and non-binary-inclusive.

In one case a trans board member didn’t feel represented by the organization name (which includes “gay”) because they now identify as straight with their new gender identity. And for this they demanded the org with thousands of gay members should be renamed.

People were afraid to push back out of fear of being labeled transphobic.

I would think ideological minority is a kind of thing that is worth considering accommodating too, but the problem is the relevant activists actively want to harm people with opposing ideology (the chosen method of enforcement is trying to get people fired and otherwise ruined). So they have no interest in ideological accommodation themselves.

Great point. In other words, we are experiencing the usual failure mode to liberalism: it can be taken advantage of by non liberal actors. Not sure what the restoring force is to prevent this.

You ignore them. And if that doesn’t work, you politely - but firmly - ask them to leave.

The reason that this is considered a failure mode is that these systems are set up so that you can't just ignore activists who speak for, or claim to be speaking for, an approved minority. Just saying "no, I'm going to ignore your demands" gets you hurt, because you are required to take positive action.

True, but in many respects that failure mode is academic, and localized. Normal people who aren't way too online don't sit around and debate whether women have penises or if men can get pregnant.

It's possible that this becomes something that is no longer an academic question.

> True, but in many respects that failure mode is academic, and localized. Normal people who aren't way too online don't sit around and debate...

But for instance, journalists are often "way too online," and people in general seem to have a bad habit of seeing social media activity as some kind of representation of society as a whole (because it's easy). It doesn't matter what "normal people" think or do, if the media as a whole starts saying something different.

Also true, journalists (the people who literally know nothing) have outsized power and influence in controlling what these "normal" people see as, well, normal.

I don't want to get in a flame war, but I guess my comments are meant to convey a perspective that is optimistic that these "normals" will reject and ignore the machinations of the way too online tech people who, again, are the only ones that want to debate basic biology for some reason. About half of my life has been on a farm or in the military, so it's amusing seeing all of this debate about "gender" and "sex". Again, normal people don't think about this.

See r/detrans for how detransitioners are bullied mercilessly.

I corrected a Latino that the proper term was Latinx - and learned that the ideology is def different than the minority :)

I find it curious that the dems chose to run this renaming experiment on latinos. They could've tried to push "blax" - at least you wouldn't need to break your tongue to pronounce it. My theory is they wanted to see how much they can bend the public opinion, and an awkward word would better test compliance.

It's not something that "the dems" made up. It seems to have started as a self-descriptive term for nonbinary Latinos, although the history's not 100% clear. But as the source article describes, there's a large and influential segment of the populace who believes that in order to be inclusive they should use trans-focused language as much as possible. So people started saying "Latinx" for precisely the same reasons as they stopped saying "pregnant women".

The word "black" does not have a gender connotation. "Latino" is a masculine word, the feminine equivalent being "Latina". That's the problem (if you consider that a problem)

The term "Latinx" was invented by Latinos.

It's also wildly unpopular among many Latinos, because there are hundreds of millions of them and they don't all have the same opinions. On the whole it seems to be a flop. But let's at least credit Latinos as a group with the agency to come up with their own ideas, good or bad, hey?

Do you have any evidence you can share about who invented “Latinx”? I’ve lived in Central America for a few years now, and the only time I’ve heard this term, or related ones, here, is when someone was mocking it. Of course that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t invented by some Latinos. But I only encounter it used with pride when I’m reading NPR articles in English.

Who exactly used it first appears to be lost to history, but the first known published academic appearance seems to have been in the Fall 2004 volume of a bilingual journal called Feministas Unidas. It was used there is passing, without explanation, apparently assuming the readers were already familiar with it. https://people.wku.edu/inma.pertusa/encuentros/FemUn/newslet...

There are reports of online usage of both "Latinx" and "Latin@" going back to the late '90s. There are other references to academic uses that I haven't been able to track to original sources after a brief search.

Mainstream media (in English or Spanish) only appears to have discovered it in the last few years. I do get the impression that a lot of early adoption was from English-speaking Latinos in the US, which might explain the apparent incompatibility with actual Spanish. I don't read Spanish myself, so there's only so far I can pursue this. But it's not a recent invention of clueless white people.

"Latine" is a compromise I've seen proposed recently. https://callmelatine.wordpress.com/

I really appreciate these details; thank you.

On “Latine”: at a recent gathering of friends I mistakenly said «miembre» for “member” instead of «miembro» (I’m still learning Spanish). This led to a certain amount of hilarity and jokes aimed at the progressive gender-neutralizing crowd, that likes to use «e» endings instead of the correct ones. It’s a small extremist minority, and a general butt of jokes here. So «Latine» would be seen as just as ridiculous as «Latinx».

"Latinx" is a germanic language construction grafted onto a Latin-based word. It makes no sense, and is non-pronounceable in Spanish. "Latine" is, perhaps, pronounceable, but is a confusing suffix. My recommendation is to drop this silliness. Germanic languages (English is one) and Romantic languages (like Spanish, French etc) have rules and trying to bleed rules from one into the other leads to the hilarity that you describe in your comment.

(I speak conversational German, a little Spanish, native English)

No actual evidence, but I get the impression that it was invented by the tiny fraction of Latino people who are at liberal arts colleges in the US, or involved in ultra-niche politics.

“Latine” and “Latin@” (and similar constructions for other -o/-a words) are not unheard of in some actual Latin American countries, though. The former has the advantage that it is straightforward to pronounce in Spanish (I assume for “Latin@s” you’d use the cumbersome “Latinas y Latinos”, and “LatinX” is just impossible).

>“Latine” and “Latin@” (and similar constructions for other -o/-a words) are not unheard of in some actual Latin American countries, though.

"Latrine", " Latin@", and "Latinx" are almost entirely unheard of in actual Latin American countries, though.

The Association of Academies of the Spanish Language is the governing body that defines what official Spanish is. If you can find a single academy that lists "Latinx" or "Latin@" as official Spanish, I'll eat my hat.

These neologisms are nothing more than US leftist linguistic imperialism.

I have actually encountered “Latine” and “Latin@” in Colombia. The academies you mention don’t determine how people speak in practice.

/r/thathappened

Why would you correct someone about what they call themselves? That seems incredibly condescending.

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