Okay, today is Speak Your Own Language Day, so I should be speaking Spanish, HOWEVER I want to use this day of language learning and appreciation to explain something about how Spanish works, and Hispanic people already know that so it wouldn't make much sense to explain it in Spanish, which is why just for this post I'm gonna use English.
I'm gonna be talking, of course, of grammatical gender, because of this viral image:
I'm sure you've seen an image like this floating around and people crying about how having non-binary be translated with a feminine and masculine form depending on usage defeats the purpose of the term.
But it doesn't!!!
Spanish is not like English, it has ✨grammatical gender✨ which has nothing to do with gender identity whatsoever. It's not that we believe chairs are female and stools are male, our grammar is just like this. Every word has a grammatical gender and there must be grammatical gender concordance. Thus, non-binary must have both a feminine and masculine form to use depending with which word you're pairing it.
Let's say you want to talk about a "non-binary person". 'Person' in Spanish is 'persona' a grammatically feminine word (despite its usage being gender neutral and encompassing people of any gender, as I said, grammatical gender ≠ gender identity). Because 'persona' is a grammatically feminine word, you have to apply grammatical concordance accordingly, and so to say "non-binary person" you would say "persona no binaria".
Now let's say you want to talk about "non-binary gender". 'Gender' in Spanish is 'género' a grammatically masculine word, and because of that to say "non-binary gender" you would say "género no binario".
See? It's not about grammatically imposed misgendering, it's about how this language is built.
But Shine, I hear you say, that's all nice and good, but how do I refer to my non-binary friend? And well, dear reader, you're in luck because I'm not only Spaniard but also non-binary myself.
In Spanish 'friend' (like a whole lot of words) has a feminine and masculine form. When those words are used to refer to people, grammatical gender does match gender identity. For the most part. And broadly speaking, feminine words are associated with the vowel -a, and masculine with the vowel -o (this is not universal, there are exceptions to this, I'm trying to paint the broad picture to give you a general idea).
So what about gender neutral? Well, officially we don't have one. The Real Academia Española doesn't recognize it... But the RAE isn't word of god, it compiles usage, so the more a term is used, the more chances it will be officially recognized. Not using a term because it's not officially recognized is actively detrimental to the goal you want to achieve.
Okay, not an official gender neutral, but what have we come up with? Well, at least in Spain, it's associating gender neutral to the vowel -e. So you have the femenine ella/la/-a, the masculine él/lo/-o, and the gender neutral elle/le/-e.
Now time for practical examples!
"My friend, David, is a boy." 🇬🇧 → 🇪🇸 "Mi amigo, David, es un chico."
"My friend, Liz, is a girl." 🇬🇧 → 🇪🇸 "Mi amiga, Liz, es una chica."
"My friend, Alex, is non-binary." 🇬🇧 → 🇪🇸 "Mi amigue, Alex, es no binarie."
And that's how you do it!! At least in queer friendly spaces in Spain, can't speak for other places. I have seen the 'x' thrown around to make gender neutral in Spanish, but -e is way more intuitive for spoken language, so I like it better.
But anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk and remember I generalized a lot when doing this. If you're learning Spanish I can only wish you good luck in dealing with our bullshit if you come from English, and assure you that once you internalize our orthography rules you will never again mispronounce a word you read for months before you hear it spoken (we have a very consistent spelling/pronunciation system, gotta be one of my favourite things about my language).
