In Spanish, if there is a group of even a billion people all but one of whom is female, the group is addressed in the masculine.
There are some bored, nasty American academics who think it’s their right to mess with a language that is not theirs (and if you are an immigrant, the language is no longer yours to regulate) and who go into fits when they see gendered adjectives or nouns. In a gesture of extreme cultural imperialism, they substitute the vowels o and a that point to gender with meaningless x. The resulting atrocity is an unpronounceable concoction like, for instance, “Latinxs.”
I once had a group of Latin American students (not immigrants, actual Latin Americans) come to my office who had a spoiled rich brat professor correct them in class when they didn’t do the dumb x thing. They were really angry. Their complex and often harsh reality was being erased to serve the needs of a rich fool who refused to entertain the possibility that somebody on the planet had more pressing concerns than her PC-hissy fit.
Before talking to these students, I never really thought about the x thing. But once I spoke to them, I realized how ridiculous we make ourselves look to anybody who has real problems and can’t worry about crap like gendered pronouns and adjectives.
Clarissa's Blog 
How about the Y thing?
As in “womyn” and “Megyn”? 🙂
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Shoot me now, is all I can say.
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“womyn”
I actually like the old eye-dialect spelling “wimmen”. It makes so much more sense than women…
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When I was an undergrad in the late 1980s, alternate spellings of “women” (including “womyn”, “wimmin”, and “womben”) were hugely popular among the radical feminists on campus.
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I never heard the “womben” one. Took me a while to figure out. At first, I wondered who Ben was. 😄😄😄
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“Wimmen” and (alternate spelling) “wimmin” are simply illiterate hillbilly dialect for “women” — nothing remotely feminist about their use.
I do like “womben” — never heard it!
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I assume “Megyn” is some crazy spelling of Megan/Meghan; I suppose with proper names you can get creative. But what the hell does “womyn” refer to?
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It’s so great that you don’t know. I truly envy you.
“Womyn” is a way to say “women” that doesn’t include the word “men.” Because every other feminist concern has been addressed, all problems have been solved, and we can now concentrate on spelling. Yippee.
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But how can feminists still allow the words “perSON” and “huMAN”?
Shouldn’t they demand that the term “HIMicane” be alternated with the term “hurricane,” since (as a result of feminist demands in the 1970’s) every other tropical storm is now given a male name?
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What do you think about “latin@s”?
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