One thing that seems to really exercise the woke is the fact that there are two genders and, with the exception of a tiny number of intersex people, you’re either one or the other: male or female. The so-called ‘gender binary’ is such a profound part of human life that many languages require different word-endings when referring to men versus women.
One language where this is true is Spanish. Consequently, a person of Latin American origin who happens to be male is a ‘Latino’, while a person of such origin who happens to be female is a ‘Latina’.
Now, there are many Hispanic people in the U.S. – the global epicentre of woke – and the usage of ‘Latino’ and ‘Latina’ has been a source of great consternation there. After all, the language the woke are used to hearing, English, doesn’t have grammatical gender. To remedy this situation, they’ve come up with a gender-neutral term for Hispanic people: ‘Latinx’ (pronounced ‘la-teen-ex’).
If you haven’t hear of this term, don’t worry: neither had 76% of Hispanics in a 2019 Pew Research survey. Although it was apparently introduced by “queer communities on the internet” in 2004, the term only started appearing on Twitter at the end of 2014.
It seems, then, ‘Latinx’ really hasn’t caught on. In the 2019 Pew Research survey, Hispanics were asked which term they preferred to “describe the Hispanic or Latino population overall”. 61% said ‘Hispanic’, 29% said ‘Latino’ and just 4% said ‘Latinx’. Even among those who’d heard of the term, the vast majority preferred ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’.
The same thing was found in 2021 Gallup survey. Although the majority of Hispanics said it “does not matter” which term is used, when asked “if you had to choose”, the overwhelming majority said ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’, and just 5% said ‘Latinx’. Suffice it to say that ‘Latinx’ is not popular among those to whom it’s supposed to refer.
But this seems to be lost on U.S. liberals, as the Skeptic Research Center recently discovered. It asked a sample of 3,000 Americans to guess what percentage of Hispanics prefer the term ‘Latinx’. Results are shown below:
As you can see, the average guess among “very liberal” respondents was 38% – which is almost ten times higher than the true figure. Even conservatives were way off the mark, although they were more accurate than their “very liberal” counterparts.
Part of the explanation may be that, when people aren’t sure about a percentage, they have a tendency to ‘rescale’ their guesses toward 50%. However, this can’t explain why conservatives were more accurate than liberals. Another part of the explanation is surely that people have been bamboozled into thinking woke terms are more popular than they really are.
Polls and surveys show that liberals are more intolerant of conservatives than vice versa. Could this be why the former are so poorly-informed about things like police shootings and the usage of buzzwords – they just aren’t hearing the other side’s perspective?
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