this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Leftguistics

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In Spanish everything is gendered, so being gender neutral is not as easy as for example English where you can just use 'they' or 'them'.

Sometimes people use the 'e' instead of the o/a (which often mark the gender of words, for example gato/gata, cat in Spanish) but it can't always be used and it just sounds really weird for a lot of people, though that might just be because it is barely used.

The other way to be gender neutral that I know is to say both the male and female versions of the word you are trying to make gender neutral, for example "trabajadores y trabajadoras" (workers[M] and workers[F]) but it's also not ideal as you have to say one of the genders first and it is pretty inconvenient to have to do that every time you refer to a group of people that is not guaranteed to be composed of one gender only.

Anyway thanks for reading my post and I hope I find out about a better way to be gender neutral in Spanish.

At least in Spanish there is never doubt how shit is pronounced, unlike in English. (Fuck English all my homies hate the English language)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There's also the option to end words with an E instead of an A or O. And to use Elle instead of El or Ella. It's not very widespread and far from standard, but it takes time for language reform this big to stick. So far I think the only popular word that uses the E suffix is Latine (aside from the words that already existed like estudiante)