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Two thoughts here:

1. If the English language needed a gender-neutral term for Latino, we could have just used "Latin", which has the triple benefit of already being an English word, already being gender neutral, and already having the desired meaning.

2. While I'm grateful for the pushback against renaming other ethnic groups without their input or consent, this is the exact same origin story as the term "Native American".

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I haven't looked into the history personally, but heard once that the original term used (by outsiders, of course) was "Latin". But because it doesn't fit well into the gendered Spanish language, it was disliked by native speakers, who went on to organically derive Latino/Latina as replacements.

If true, that makes the English-speaking movement to replace Latino/Latina with Latinx doubly ridiculous.

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