As I brain injured idiot, I am easily confused. I get that.

There is a group of people who object to gendered languages (Romance languages, German, etc) which assign a gender to inanimate objects. Example: Latina and Latino, where Latina is feminine, Latino is masculine or both (as in a group).

Some academics (mostly in the U.S.) proposed renaming the Latin community to LatinX (or various other new terms) and creating new categories of gender (such as “nine” in place of nina/nino). See Spanish: A Gendered Language Seeking to be More Inclusive – Terra Translations and Royal Spanish Academy dismisses movement to make Spanish more gender-inclusive – The World from PRX. Surveys of the global Spanish speaking population show that those who natively speak Spanish have no interest in redefining their own language; yet some westerners are trying to force them to redefine their own language – hence, the term cultural imperialism.

Simultaneously, other groups want to end the use of traditional gender pronouns: He, She – and use words like Ze: An (incomplete) list of gender pronouns – LGBTQ Nation. Or to redefine they/them from the plural (more than one person), to mean a plural gender (they/them – meaning an individual with a range of gender pronouns).

I’m confused – in the first example, a bunch of people want us to redefine other people’s traditional languages (a goal that some view as cultural imperialism, to take away another’s culture), and in the second example, a bunch of people want us to create dozens of new pronouns, or to redefine existing words to have multiple meanings (they, them – referring to multiple people, or an individual with multiple self identifies).

People want it both ways – non-gendered language but more gendered pronouns.

Infinite gender pronouns becomes like the gendered German language. To back up, Spanish gender is usually easy to determine by the ending of the noun (e.g. casa ends in an “a”, making it feminine gender, as in la casa, or nina/nino – for child). German is bewildering because it has no obvious rule for a noun to be feminine or male (or something else). For those learning German, it is necessary to memorize noun+gender, rather than just noun. English, by comparison, does not really do gendered nouns – a house is a house (indefinite form) or the house (definite form). English does not have (female) house or (male) house concepts.

With the new concept of an infinite number of gender pronouns, we no longer know if someone is a “he” or a “she” but may instead be, through self-identity, one of dozens of pronouns. If you or I look at someone who has XY chromosomes, looks and sounds like a male, but use the wrong pronoun, we are at fault. Some say you get one free pass to “misgender” – after that you commit a hate crime by not using the right gender. But this means you now must remember the name and gender of the potentially hundreds of people you know, and also learn the name and gender of persons you interact with temporarily. If you make a mistake, you have committed a hate crime.

The problem with “invisible” characteristics is similar to the those with invisible disabilities. I have had multiple brain injuries – but you can’t tell that by looking at me. There are many people with many kinds of invisible disabilities. If someone does not understand this, have they committed a hate crime?

We don’t ask people with disabilities to carry a name tag proclaiming their disability, nor do we insist that those who want a non-expected gender pronoun to publicly display their pronoun. The result is we are making language more complex, and life more difficult (accidental hate crimes) – because there is no simple way to know which of a dozens of pronouns we are to use for any individual.

This seems to lead to problems with small benefits. Is this really the best solution? To have dozens of personal pronouns? Or to redefine other people’s languages to suit our own special interests?