Glosario

Inclusive non-binary gender language

Glossary

Inclusive non-binary gender language

With the emergence of new gender identities beyond man or woman (and thus the binary language male or female to name the subjects of a sentence) neologisms emerged to call non-binary people. In the case of Spanish, the letter “e” is used to debunk a word that has binary gender. For example, in the case of the word “all”, in masculine it is “all”, in feminine it is “all” and in non-binary it is “all”. Not all words have binary gender, therefore not all words are modified for a non-binary gender. For example, the word “table” is feminine in its only version and since there is no male version of the word (there is no “meso”) it is unnecessary to speak of “le mese”. Non-binary pronouns also emerged, such as “le” in “he and the” option, “elles” in “they and they” option and “us” in “us” option. There are other forms of gender-inclusive language such as gender-neutral language, which does not use the letter “e” but tries to avoid using terms that have a gender, whatever. It is harder to use than non-binary gender language because it requires replacing words with gender constantly with words without gender.

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