Exactly! I would add that you can still use "no binario" or "no binaria" in a (somewhat) respectful manner. For instance, you can say "persona no binaria" (non binary person), "comunidad no binaria" (non binary community), because both nouns are feminine, you can use the feminine alteration of "no binario". For masculine I would go with "su género es no binario" (its gender in non binary), since gender is masculine and "su" doesn't imply any gender at all.
Again, not an expert just another fellow native Spanish speaker with a bit of a geekiness about languages.
I think the e thing sounds fucking stupid, however if that makes people happy, so be it, language is supposed to evolve over time, the e is only annoying if you actively oppose to it (or are in a position where you're not allowed to make mistakes)
agree, except "doesn't exist in the language" - if people are saying it, it exists in the language, there's no committee deciding what's "in" or "out" of Spanish (or English, for that matter).
Yes there is a committee for Spanish. It’s called the Real Academia Española. Their official mission is to ensure the stability of the Spanish language across 22 hispanophone countries. I reference them daily because I don’t speak Spanish fluently yet I live in a Spanish speaking country.
This isn't correct, actually. English is the only major language that has no formal regulators of the language, and Spanish is one of the most formally regulated.
This isn't entirely true either. The adjective "binario" has to agree with the gender of what's being talked about, either the grammatical gender of the noun or the natural gender of the person. A salient example could be the noun "piloto". Just as adjectives inflect for gender so do pronouns, so you can say "el piloto" or "la piloto" depending on the natural gender of the person, and inflect adjectives accordingly.
Grammatical gender and natural gender are both distict concepts that impact gender inflection in spanish.
Are there any spanish people? Is it based on person's gender or the following word's gender?
e.g. in Russian, "nebinarniy chelovek" means nonbinary human but in male declension because the word human itself is male, and "nebinarnaya persona" is female because the word person is female. We also have "nebimarnoye litso" where "litso" is face or a person and it's a third gender literally called soulless and beloved by police and lawyers because its dehumanizing
It's an example of a language with grammatical gender they are familiar with, so of course they use it as an example. Works the same way in most (all?) slavic languages.
It's true that gender issues are not even something that is talked about currently in Russia. But I'm just using the example from OP post to talk about linguistic features here. For me and I think most English speaking folk it might sound confusing whether Spanish grammatical gender implies person's gender and threw example in Russian where it doesn't have to - I can talk about you in male, female, or neutral gender. It only depends on which words I use and which endings they have.
I don't know why you're being down voted. As a Spanish speaker, it's a definite limitation of the language. Where is the penis on a pen, or the vagina on a pencil? Not everything needs a gender, even if you take a firm stance on the existence of non-binary people.
Most people speaking a certain language don’t view it as gender gender. They view it as grammar. They usually view it as “this word changes the end of the adjective to ‘e’ instead of ‘a’” or whatever rule your language has.
Gender in languages aren’t just, “that object seems female” or “that object seems male” because they are many rules that change the gender of the object even if it looks “manly”. For example, in Punjabi, there’s a rule where if the noun has an “ee” at the end, it will be feminine regardless of its characteristics because the sentence flows better that way in Punjabi.
Languages just have gender because it sounds easier to say/flows nicely, rarely actually because they think a certain object has an actual gender.
The joke is:
Non-binary refers to people not identifying with either being exclusive male nor female.
The post shows someone asking ChatGPT what this is called in spanish.
As spanish seems to have gender for nouns, this defeats the purpose of being neither female/male.
A non binary person would be "una persona non binaria", which is a gendered word, female.
It partially makes sense. Non-binary in Spanish is gendered depending on the subject. But it is not a real gender. Person is "female", human being is "male". But they are generic words
It's an adjective so it must match the gender of the noun before it. So if you want to say non-binary person, since person is femenine, you'd say "persona no binaria". Unfortunately, however, most nouns change gender depending on the gender of the person referred to. So you can't say non-binary gardener without resorting to "made up" grammar.
I think there is a grammatical rule for it, if you refer to a group of multi-gendered subjects you use the male suffix, so "no binario" would be the correct term to use.
The joke is that someone who is non-binary doesn't identify as male or female, yet Spanish is a gendered language and thus ChatGPT provides male and female forks of the word "non-binary".
In Spanish, everything is gendered, usually descenable by an -a or -o ending.
So Spanish requires you to pick the male/female linguistic gender to refer to a person in order to say that their gender doesn't fit on the male/female binary.
I believe Spanish speakers just resolve it by using -o by default, because linguistic gender is not identical to social gender.
It's roughly like if English made you say "they're masculine-non-binary".
As a Spanish speaker the joke does make sense as is referring to how Spanish is usually spoken but it misses the detail that there's now the use of new gendered words.
Is really hard to explain in just a post but is a preview substantives in Spanish have a gender even things that you wouldn't consider gendered they have it it affects the use of the words and how you address people.
For example a simple word like "the" note that table is mesa and book es libro sona simple translation like
The table >becomes> La mesa
The book >becomes> El libro
The translates to La or El depending of the "gender" of the word. Is not that we consider every book male and every table female but we use gendered pronouns for objects and there is gendered words for everything that refers to a person. For example nurse translates to Enfermero or Enfermera depending if you talk about a msle or female person respectively, note the word ends in o or a now the troubles are if you're using plurals it will be Enfermeros and Enfermeras and the first refers to a group of people that can be all male or mixed male and female but the second refers to a group of people that is only composed of females and worse of all nonbinary people are not comprehended into any of this. You see the language is always throwing everything into male female bins even unwillingly and for a non gender conforming person that's hell. Now we could fill a book with how we are handling it but it has been tried to use the letter e returning to the nurse examples it will be Enfermere but the particle now is Le Enfermere and Les Enfermeres and now the second would be totally gender neutral and refers to a group of nurse people no matter the sex. But there's a truckload more nuances. General neutral and how we use it is an ongoing problem in Spanish that we haven't fixed it yet, and there's no general concensus Of where is going.
I mean, none of this makes sense. You can't be non binary, that's not a thing. You also can't change the rules of language on the fly, so it makes sense chatGPT wouldn't understand bs new language.
Hi hello I'm your friendly neighborhood molecular biologist and I want to tell you (or anyone who might think like you) that you're totally fucken wrong lol
It is commonly accepted by contemporary biological scientists that sex exists on a spectrum. The technical definition of sex involves the size of gametes (in humans: sperm and egg cells) that are created by the organism, but we don't usually go around "unsexing" people who don't make gametes (the infertile, the elderly, etc.)
Instead we might look at chromosomes, genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics (beard, breasts, voice, etc.). Although the state of these characteristics often aligns (ie. XY usually means penis and more hair) they for sure definitely do not always.
You can have unusual chromosome combinations (XXY, XXX, etc.), you can have a modification of the signalling pathway for sex hormones (androgen insensitivity), you can have mutations in specific genes relating to secondary sex phenotypes (extra hair, no hair, voice changes, etc.). You might have a person whose gentalia say "female" but chromosomes say "male". You might get a person whose face, voice, and body says "female" but whose genitalia say "male".
You might think these things are too rare to bother with, but intersexuality (defined as a person who's sex can't be conventionally filtered into male or female) is estimated to be as common as 2% of the population (basically the same as red-headed people in the USA). Many people estimate that the actual incidence of unalignment between all sex characteristics as assigned gender is even more common if we expanded the definition to include internal brain structures relating to sexual and gender identity, or natural differences in hormone quantities that overlap between members of different sexes. Basically, science says non-binary is valid as fuck.
That's not even to get into the social construct of gender, but there's a whole scholarly discipline there as well. But I'm a biologist and people weirdly trust essentialist constructs of sex and gender more than social ones, so here I am.
Chromosomes also randomly change when people decide to change their gender right! Sex doesn't exist on a spectrum, there can be genetic abnormalities but that doesn't mean the person is non binary. They are still a woman or man in their nature, but something went wrong along the way and they got a genetic mutation. 99% of trans/non-binary people do not have these mutations. Take your woke pile of garbage and go back to the hole you came from.