Saturday, May 16, 2015

living as a non-binary or gender neutral trans person in Spanish

Radio Ambulante has a fantastic program here that talks about how you speak in Spanish when you want to avoid having to say estoy cansadO or cansadA.

I recently attended a conference where attendees were asked if they preferred to be referred to as he/she/ or them and this was put on your nametag along with a respective colored dot so that others could see that quickly.  More and more trans folks are wanting to exist outside of gender binaries and ask to be referred to as them.  I've even seen some cis folks using it lately.  But how on earth do you translate this into Spanish? Ell@ still falls into gender binaries. Some get around it by using ellxs, (and unxs, etc) - but I think this gets really confusing for the uninitiated.

Andrea Parra, director of the Programa de Acción por la Igualdad y la Inclusión Social, works with the trans coalition Aquelarre Trans in Colombia, and she suggests using elle.  She writes "more and more trans people are using words ending in e for all inclusive. For example, amigues, elles, compañeres etc."

Fantastic! 

ps: aquelarre? coven in English