www.pewresearch.org
Latinx Used by Just 3% of U.S. Hispanics. About One-in-Four Have Heard of It.The term Latinx has emerged in recent years as a gender-neutral alternative to the pan-ethnic terms Latino, Latina and Hispanic. However, awareness of Latinx is relatively low among the population it is meant to describe.
The term Latinx is the Latin community's way of attempting to be gender inclusive, as the Spanish language itself is based on gendered pronouns. The newer term I have come to know is Latin@ (pronounced la-tee-now), is beginning to surface. These terms allow people of Latin descent to feel more comfortable in expressing themselves, without having to identify themselves as gendered sexual beings. Those who are already struggling with finding and coming to terms with their identities should not also be forced to choose a pronoun that is either male or female, and have their entire lives based off of it. To have your community support you on your journey and become more inclusive is a wonderful thought and creating terms like Latinx or Latin@ is a step in the right place. This allows the person using the term to feel more accepted and welcomed by their own community, in their own language.
I find this incredibly interesting because for the longest time I had heard the term "Latinx" but i honestly wasn't sure what it meant. Although I am not of the latin decent I find it fascinating because it shows a generational divide in the latin community. I read something somewhere that reminds me a bit about this topic it went something like "refusal to conform to male/female gender binaries was parallel to the refusal to conform to a racial binary.” I see that here in this article when speaking about the Latinx community.