> why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.

It's easy to blame patriarchy, but is it the responsible? According to linguists, the answer resides in how gender was introduced in European languages from the Proto Indo European [1, 2]. The feminine genus, in grammatical sense, was introduced later as a specialization of the general "animated" category. Therefore, what later became masculine was used for all "general humans", and was left the default form when gender was not indicated. Example even in English (and other proto-German languages) where nouns are (mostly) not gendered: you have the word of "woman" as a specialization of "man", which does not indicate the male, but it originally indicated the "human being" [3]. We are talking about the dawn of European languages, so take these as educated hypotheses, but blaming patriarchy is a very modern (and unsubstantiated) view.

The need to use a gender (either masculine or feminine) as the default gender is a need in the lack of a neutral gender for humans. Other languages in the world, like Maasai, use the feminine as the "default" gender, others have a proper neutral-animated gender.

Having a neutral gender in Spanish would be great, because it removes ambiguity in many cases where the sex is unknown, but introducing it, especially in languages like Spanish or Italian where all nouns are gendered, is a _massive_ undertaking, which would shake the foundations of those languages and would require a lot of energy by all its speakers. Theoretically possible, sure (we can make up any language we like), but I don't see a minority of agendered people being able to move so much inertia.

So how to go about it? The "x" or other non-standard symbols are pointless because unpronounceable. The "e" can work in Spanish (won't in Italian), and only for some cases, example above all: "españoles" is masculine. Choosing masculine and feminine randomly doesn't work either, it causes confusion and can even sound sexist in certain contexts (I've tried it and found myself in that situation).

My personal take is to stick to the rule: "default" gender is masculine. It's just a choice, as it would have been if we chose feminine (also remembering that the grammatical gender has -in most cases- nothing to do with sex). However, I also try to avoid ambiguities, even at the cost of redundancy, and try to introduce variation as much as possible, still within the constraints of the rules.

[1] https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf [2] https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.305.04lur [3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman

Patriarchy is ancient! Yes it's quite fucked up that "woman" literally means "of man" — learning that in school was one of the things that radicalized me.

More than the actual policy prescriptions I'm interested in the reactions various cultures have when challenged on this. You get to see a rather extreme amount of emotional fragility, certainly a lot more than would be justified by a mindset of curiosity and openness. To me that is a pretty strong sign that something is deeply rotten in the culture (and I include my own culture here).

As I said elsewhere, I believe that scientific humanism is the most morally robust worldview in existence. I don't want to tell other people what to do, but I am going to live my life with moral conviction, and that includes saying what I believe to be true about other cultures.