4 ms·

I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but th

I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away. Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral. It is not an unreasonable stance from a purely descriptive standpoint, but the amount of sensitivity that comes if anyone tries to interrogate it indicates a deeper rot in the respective cultures. Like — why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy. (By the way, "Latine" is what the queer people of that ethnicity I know use. I think between Latine being a better grammatical fit and cishet feelings being damaged, Latinx mostly fell out of favor. And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.)

ryandv 2y ago
> I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away. Adoption of new language imposed by whites upon the diaspora of an ethnic minority is different from that minority introducing the term themselves. The neologism "Filipinx" appears to have originated on dictionary.com [0] [1], with no Filipino spokesperson, residing in the Philippines, North America, or otherwise, publicly endorsing the term (quite the opposite). I invite you to provide sources to substantiate the claim that it was in fact introduced by Filipino diaspora. All I can find is a statement by one "John Kelly" [0]: “Among our many new entries are thousands of deeper, dictionary-wide revisions that touch us on our most personal levels: how we talk about ourselves and our identities, from race to sexual orientation to mental health,” said John Kelly, senior editor at Dictionary.com. Ethnic minorities overseas in western culture are subjugated to the cultural dominance of whites and expected to adopt their lexicon or risk severe social censure; this is the essence of the definition of "systemic racism" as proposed by DiAngelo. > Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral. Tagalog is already ungendered. "Filipino" is ungendered. It is you who presuppose, based on Eurocentric linguistic norms, that "Filipino" is a gendered term and is assigned the male gender, and then from that presupposition conclude that the word "Filipino" is gendered and therefore patriarchal. This is an instance of begging the question, where you presuppose the very matter under contention. This is cyclical reasoning based on a predominantly white cultural worldview and linguistic background. Some — mostly those who grew up in the Philippines — argue that “Filipino” is already a gender-neutral term because the Filipino language itself does not differentiate between genders. Meanwhile, others — mostly from the large Filipino diaspora — say it is sexist, a holdover from the gendered Spanish that influenced the country’s languages. [1] > And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary. You again expose your ignorance of other cultures with this comment. Bakla culture [2] in the Philippines has a very long and well-established history that predates Western colonization, and is already considered a third gender, already escaping the male/female dichotomy. Stop imposing your white framing upon other cultures. That is in fact the definition of cultural and linguistic imperialism. [0] https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1332278/filipinx-pinxy-among-new-nonbinary-words-in-online-dictionary https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1332278/filipinx-pinxy-among-n... [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-language-philippines-culture-identity/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla
- sunshowers 2y ago
  I'm not white. I'm Indian, and I also happen to be a trans woman. I'm fully aware of cultures with three traditional genders like my own -- I'm also deeply suspicious of them. The third gender is virtually always constructed to be transmisogynistic, to exclude trans women from womanhood. That isn't true binary-smashing gender diversity, that is merely "men", "women", and "we don't believe you're really women". Traditional third genders also typically only have room for straight trans people -- there is no room for a queer trans person like myself. Even today you have a lot of clueless people wondering how someone can be both bi/gay and trans -- something about it breaks the cishet brain in a way I've never really understood. Modern western progressive ideas about gender diversity are far closer to reality than any traditional culture's, because they're grounded in science and humanism. (This is not to say that they're perfect -- I have several specific criticisms of queer theory authors like Judith Butler.) I am quite proudly a scientific humanist and I believe it is the most morally robust worldview in existence.
  - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - sunshowers 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
        Huh?
        sunshowers 2y ago
        [flagged]
        ConspiracyFact 2y ago
dariosalvi78 2y ago
> why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy. It's easy to blame patriarchy, but is it the responsible? According to linguists, the answer resides in how gender was introduced in European languages from the Proto Indo European [1, 2]. The feminine genus, in grammatical sense, was introduced later as a specialization of the general "animated" category. Therefore, what later became masculine was used for all "general humans", and was left the default form when gender was not indicated. Example even in English (and other proto-German languages) where nouns are (mostly) not gendered: you have the word of "woman" as a specialization of "man", which does not indicate the male, but it originally indicated the "human being" [3]. We are talking about the dawn of European languages, so take these as educated hypotheses, but blaming patriarchy is a very modern (and unsubstantiated) view. The need to use a gender (either masculine or feminine) as the default gender is a need in the lack of a neutral gender for humans. Other languages in the world, like Maasai, use the feminine as the "default" gender, others have a proper neutral-animated gender. Having a neutral gender in Spanish would be great, because it removes ambiguity in many cases where the sex is unknown, but introducing it, especially in languages like Spanish or Italian where all nouns are gendered, is a _massive_ undertaking, which would shake the foundations of those languages and would require a lot of energy by all its speakers. Theoretically possible, sure (we can make up any language we like), but I don't see a minority of agendered people being able to move so much inertia. So how to go about it? The "x" or other non-standard symbols are pointless because unpronounceable. The "e" can work in Spanish (won't in Italian), and only for some cases, example above all: "españoles" is masculine. Choosing masculine and feminine randomly doesn't work either, it causes confusion and can even sound sexist in certain contexts (I've tried it and found myself in that situation). My personal take is to stick to the rule: "default" gender is masculine. It's just a choice, as it would have been if we chose feminine (also remembering that the grammatical gender has -in most cases- nothing to do with sex). However, I also try to avoid ambiguities, even at the cost of redundancy, and try to introduce variation as much as possible, still within the constraints of the rules. [1] https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf [2] https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.305.04lur https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.305.04lur [3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman

ryandv 2y ago

> I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away. Adoption of new language imposed by whites upon the diaspora of an ethnic minority is different from that minority introducing the term themselves. The neologism "Filipinx" appears to have originated on dictionary.com [0] [1], with no Filipino spokesperson, residing in the Philippines, North America, or otherwise, publicly endorsing the term (quite the opposite). I invite you to provide sources to substantiate the claim that it was in fact introduced by Filipino diaspora. All I can find is a statement by one "John Kelly" [0]: “Among our many new entries are thousands of deeper, dictionary-wide revisions that touch us on our most personal levels: how we talk about ourselves and our identities, from race to sexual orientation to mental health,” said John Kelly, senior editor at Dictionary.com. Ethnic minorities overseas in western culture are subjugated to the cultural dominance of whites and expected to adopt their lexicon or risk severe social censure; this is the essence of the definition of "systemic racism" as proposed by DiAngelo. > Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral. Tagalog is already ungendered. "Filipino" is ungendered. It is you who presuppose, based on Eurocentric linguistic norms, that "Filipino" is a gendered term and is assigned the male gender, and then from that presupposition conclude that the word "Filipino" is gendered and therefore patriarchal. This is an instance of begging the question, where you presuppose the very matter under contention. This is cyclical reasoning based on a predominantly white cultural worldview and linguistic background. Some — mostly those who grew up in the Philippines — argue that “Filipino” is already a gender-neutral term because the Filipino language itself does not differentiate between genders. Meanwhile, others — mostly from the large Filipino diaspora — say it is sexist, a holdover from the gendered Spanish that influenced the country’s languages. [1] > And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary. You again expose your ignorance of other cultures with this comment. Bakla culture [2] in the Philippines has a very long and well-established history that predates Western colonization, and is already considered a third gender, already escaping the male/female dichotomy. Stop imposing your white framing upon other cultures. That is in fact the definition of cultural and linguistic imperialism. [0] https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1332278/filipinx-pinxy-among-new-nonbinary-words-in-online-dictionary https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1332278/filipinx-pinxy-among-n... [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-language-philippines-culture-identity/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla

sunshowers 2y ago
I'm not white. I'm Indian, and I also happen to be a trans woman. I'm fully aware of cultures with three traditional genders like my own -- I'm also deeply suspicious of them. The third gender is virtually always constructed to be transmisogynistic, to exclude trans women from womanhood. That isn't true binary-smashing gender diversity, that is merely "men", "women", and "we don't believe you're really women". Traditional third genders also typically only have room for straight trans people -- there is no room for a queer trans person like myself. Even today you have a lot of clueless people wondering how someone can be both bi/gay and trans -- something about it breaks the cishet brain in a way I've never really understood. Modern western progressive ideas about gender diversity are far closer to reality than any traditional culture's, because they're grounded in science and humanism. (This is not to say that they're perfect -- I have several specific criticisms of queer theory authors like Judith Butler.) I am quite proudly a scientific humanist and I believe it is the most morally robust worldview in existence.
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - sunshowers 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
      Huh?
      - sunshowers 2y ago
        [flagged]
        ConspiracyFact 2y ago

dariosalvi78 2y ago

> why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy. It's easy to blame patriarchy, but is it the responsible? According to linguists, the answer resides in how gender was introduced in European languages from the Proto Indo European [1, 2]. The feminine genus, in grammatical sense, was introduced later as a specialization of the general "animated" category. Therefore, what later became masculine was used for all "general humans", and was left the default form when gender was not indicated. Example even in English (and other proto-German languages) where nouns are (mostly) not gendered: you have the word of "woman" as a specialization of "man", which does not indicate the male, but it originally indicated the "human being" [3]. We are talking about the dawn of European languages, so take these as educated hypotheses, but blaming patriarchy is a very modern (and unsubstantiated) view. The need to use a gender (either masculine or feminine) as the default gender is a need in the lack of a neutral gender for humans. Other languages in the world, like Maasai, use the feminine as the "default" gender, others have a proper neutral-animated gender. Having a neutral gender in Spanish would be great, because it removes ambiguity in many cases where the sex is unknown, but introducing it, especially in languages like Spanish or Italian where all nouns are gendered, is a _massive_ undertaking, which would shake the foundations of those languages and would require a lot of energy by all its speakers. Theoretically possible, sure (we can make up any language we like), but I don't see a minority of agendered people being able to move so much inertia. So how to go about it? The "x" or other non-standard symbols are pointless because unpronounceable. The "e" can work in Spanish (won't in Italian), and only for some cases, example above all: "españoles" is masculine. Choosing masculine and feminine randomly doesn't work either, it causes confusion and can even sound sexist in certain contexts (I've tried it and found myself in that situation). My personal take is to stick to the rule: "default" gender is masculine. It's just a choice, as it would have been if we chose feminine (also remembering that the grammatical gender has -in most cases- nothing to do with sex). However, I also try to avoid ambiguities, even at the cost of redundancy, and try to introduce variation as much as possible, still within the constraints of the rules. [1] https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf [2] https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.305.04lur https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.305.04lur [3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman