Inclusive language - any Spanish speakers around?

[IamAporcupine]

(first post, so apologies if I am not very articulate)

How do you deal with the use of the inclusive language?

As I understand, it first started as a stand against the use of the generic male article, which I totaly agree with (although I do not think that it should be the main battle). So in principle, I would be up for using 'tod@s/todxs/todes' if this is meant as a political position re. equality.

However, it then got extended so that it is meant to include male/females/anything else in the non-binary spectrum. This I do not buy but I cannot fully explain why.

I have only recently started to become more vocal about this subject and it is certainly not going down well. All my feminist friends seem to think this is THE way forward.

ps - the same might be the case for French/Italian/etc of course

I used to use tod@s to include women and men if appropriate. I no longer do so as it has been used very inappropriately to obscure who we are really talking about. The use of violencia de género instead of violencia machista also winds me up.

todes etc

I like todes but not the other two, as they are unpronouneable.

A similar thing is happening in German. It makes language very awkward indeed.

In German, there is a different suffix for females and males; the generic word is male, and to make it female you add -in or -innen (plural).

For years, people had to use both versions to be inclusive of females:
so you had to say "male and female.... (doctors, citizens, voters, students etc.) every single time. It was so clumsy and word-wasting and just plain ugly. I would have preferred it if they simply abolished the -in suffix to officially make the generic word inclusive, as it is in other languages, but using the correctly sexed article: Der Student, Die Student. Or else abolishing the generic word and only using the -in suffix to include men as well.

It would take getting used to, for German speakers, but non-native speakers always get the article and pronouns wrong anyway (with non-human entities!) so I guess that's why it wouldn't bother me! :)

After that, and I think most people didn't like it, the trend in German was to have "the interior I". So you would write "StudenInnen" to be inclusive of both male and female students, with the interior I written large. Or else a slash: Student/innen.

Yesterday I got a Round Robin letter from a German teacher I' friends with and she used an interior asterisk: Student*innen. So that's the latest development. It still feels/sounds awkward, and you can't even pronounce it in speech. Do you make a glottal stop, or what?

@Angryresister - I totally agree re. violencia de 'género'

@Malahaha - that's interesting

As I said I have no problem to use any of these versions (@/x/e) in order to include women, but I don't think that's what is happening anymore. The emphasis shifted from "including women" to "to including all genders".

I read the other day "Aborto para todes" and it really made my blood boil. WTF?

[quote IamAporcupine]@Malahaha - that's interesting

As I said I have no problem to use any of these versions (@/x/e) in order to include women, but I don't think that's what is happening anymore. The emphasis shifted from "including women" to "to including all genders".

I read the other day "Aborto para todes" and it really made my blood boil. WTF?[/quote]
Yes, that's the problem. The German issue is at least about including women. I have no idea what most Germans think about the whole gender-neutralifying of language. The entire language is so very gendered, but there IS a neutral option so maybe they should just go for that: everybody being an IT! :)

Something similar is done in French: the feminine version of nouns, adjectives and verbs is often indicated with an additional "e", so you see things like this to use grammar that is inclusive of all genders: « un-e bon-ne militant-e »

So the masculine version is "un bon militant" and the feminine is "une bonne militante" and the internal hyphen separates the two forms.

I think that is largely still used to be inclusive of women. There are some gender neutral pronouns (iels and illes are the main ones) which are used for non-binary people.

If you want to go deep down the rabbit hole, this blog post is a loooooooong introspection about how to include non binary people in feminist discourse:
lavieenqueer.wordpress.com/2020/04/15/comment-inclure-les-personnes-non-binaires-dans-les-discours-feministes/

I was amused to see that the author, despite insisting that it is wrong, misgendering and "enbyphobique" to assume that non-binaries should or want to be included in feminist discussions, mostly defaults to using the feminine forms when talking about non-binary people.

In English we no longer have a formal/informal distinction in the 2nd person of the verb, which I believe stems from the Quakers insisting on using "thou" for everyone. The gentry for upset about it and the result was everyone ended up using "you" for everyone. I'm half hoping that something similar happens with gendered pronouns. They it gets so complicated to remember that this person is "xie" and this one is "iels" that we end up defaulting to using "they" as a generic, non-gendered singular form for everyone!

I am obviously very late to everything (I do nto live in my home country) but it seems that people (women) are using 'cuerpa' (instead of cuerpo) now?

Has anyone else heard it in their countries?
I really dislike it