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It appears that the first lady is in need of some re-education.
Y esterday, Jill Biden spoke at the LatinX IncluXion Luncheon, and — actually, wait a moment, what are the rules here, again? The “LatinX IncluXion Luncheon”? What in the hell is going on with that name?
The stated purpose of the neologism “Latinx” is to remove the gendered part of the Spanish word “Latino”/“Latina” and replace it with something more “inclusive.” The obvious purpose of the neologism “IncluXion” is to match the “x” that results from the degendered “Latino” in the following word, “inclusion,” even if “inclusion” itself isn’t actually gendered. But what can explain the event organizers’ failure to match this pattern in the final ungendered word, “Luncheon”? And why, if the existence of gendered words is so problematic, didn’t Jill Biden apply the same practice throughout her keynote speech?
In the passage that garnered the most attention, Biden said: “Raul [Yzaguirre] helped build this organization with the understanding that the diversity of this community, as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio, is your strength.” This should have been amended in accordance with the conference’s syntactical rules. Surely, Biden meant that “Raul helped build this organization with the understanding that the diversity of this community, as distinct as the bodegxs of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami and as unique as the breakfast tacxs here in San Antonix, is their strength.” Biden is lucky that, by a quirk of historical transliteration, “Bronx” has already been fixed. Had she chosen, say, San Diego instead, she’d have had her work cut out for her. (Not that there is anything wrong with that, if one is differently abled or in possession of a non-capitalist conception of value.)
Fortunately, Biden apologized. Unfortunately, her contrition was linguistically suspect, too. After she’d suggested that Hispanics were diverse like breakfast tacos — in a line that a professional speechwriter actually wrote out, looked at more than once, and then endorsed as fit for purpose — Biden’s office said she regretted “that her words conveyed anything but pure admiration and love for the Latino community.” Well: Wow. We cannot, I hope, be expected to believe that it is incluxive of the Latinx community for the keynote speaker at the LatinX IncluXion Luncheon to refer to Latinxs as “Latinos” in her mea culpx? On the contrary: By the logic of Latinx construction, one must conclude that Jill Biden was apologizing solely to the male attendees, while ignoring — spiting, even — the Latina and non-binary attendees.
Worse yet, Biden’s apology was issued on behalf of the “First Lady” — an archaic and classist term that not only platforms and normalizes the exclusionary, transphobic, non-scientific concept of womanhood, but also centers and reiterates our hierarchical, Western-imperialist preference for ordinal numbers, and thereby reinforces the idea that some people are lesser than others. Were she truly committed to the breaking down of barriers, she would have insisted that any letter within the alphabet that resembles an ordinal number be removed from both the name of the conference and from her speech. This would have required replacing “i” and “l,” both of which look too much like “1”; “s,” which looks too much like “5”; “q,” which looks too much like “9”; “b,” which looks too much like “6”; and “o,” which looks too much like “0” — the result of which would have been a speech to the far more incluxive “XatxnX XncxuXxxn Xunchexn” that included the key line: “Raux helped buxxd thxx xrganxzatxxn wxth the underxtandxng that the dxverxxty xf thxs cxmmunxty, ax dxxtxnct ax the xxdegxx xf the Xrxnx, ax xeautxfux ax the xxxxxxmx xf Mxamx and ax unxxue ax the xreakfaxt tacxx here xn Xan Antxnxx, xx thexr xtrength.”
Not only would this have been admirably non-discriminatory — it would have yielded the added advantage of being so remarkably difficult to read that Biden wouldn’t have got herself into trouble in the first place.