That might only be surprising to the academics, Hollywood stars, and policymakers who, for some reason, keep using it. Like other Romance languages, gendered language is woven into the fabric of Spanish. That’s why the Royal Spanish Academy so fiercely resisted attempts to incorporate the term into its lexicon.

Citing the swing of Hispanic voters away from the Democratic party in 2020, columnist Jamelle Bouie puts it this way, “No message, no matter how strong on the surface, will land if it isn’t attentive to those forces and the other forces that structure the lives of ordinary people.”

Terms like Latinx assume a view of the world people don’t actually live in: where “race” is all-consuming, and the daily reality of gender is ignored.