But beyond the way this new word Latinx feels on the tongue, there are a few reasons people like myself are hesitant to start using it. One is the fact that, yes, the Spanish language itself is gender-based, and while you can argue the inherent anti-feminism and exclusivity in that, for many people of Latin descent, you just don’t think about gender when speaking Spanish. When you look at “un libro,” for example, the book is not a male book; that’s just the word. When the label for a group of women becomes masculine when a male enters, you don’t think of that as making the group male; the words automatically just take one form (yes, the masculine one) when there are multiple genders involved. That’s the way the language works.