It’s essentially the same word too:

“Un” == “less” “Home” == “house”

It’s just another example of the Euphemism Treadmill.

That x is generally pronounced as an “e” in Spanish (i.e. “latine”, not “latin eks” or “latinks” and most certainly not “latinj”, as the j sound of x is only before a vowel, e.g. xavier = javier).

But why write an x and not an e? Because there are consonants that change their sound with an “e”. So, say, the word “chicos” (boys) and “chicas” (girls) would be written as “chiques” in neutral because the c sounds like an s and not like a k with an e in front… but “chiques” doesn’t look like “chicos”… visually it’s not recognizable… while “chicxs” is much easier to parse.

This is how it works. I don’t care to enter a discussion of whether this is nice or not, good or bad. I’ll just leave with the anecdote that I once participated in a project that involved a big survey written in the traditional “neutral” form, which consists of writing “chicos/as” to covers both binary genders. That form quickly becomes very hard to read… “Los chicos/as están sentados/as con sus nuevos/as compañeros/as”. Use of the x has a lot of pushback from some people, but all in all, it’s easier to adapt to.

We don’t have much of an Arabic community here.

Did they? English used to be gendered but lost it ~1000 years ago.

Languages evolve in odd ways and don’t think the patriarchy or religion have much to do with it.

"Spotkałem kolegę" - "I [male] met a [male] friend."

"Spotkałam kolegę" - "I [female] met a [male] friend."

"Spotkałem koleżankę" - "I [male] met a [female] friend."

"Spotkałam koleżankę" - "I [female] met a [female] friend."

Notice the different ending (em/am) depending on whether a male or female is speaking.

Yes, many languages have no gender or have a generic option besides genders.

I always find this very annoying in Roman languages, where every object has an arbitrary gender, and to make matters worse it's not always the same. A word that is female in Spanish could be male in Italian or Portuguese. It trips me up a lot and it's annoying because the gender is just some arbitrary thing there, it has no meaning because objects have no gender. If we're talking about people I can understand but things?

But languages are not very logical. They are something that melted together over centuries out of habit.

It’s no surprise that the strongest (mainstream) gendered languages are also known as the ‘Romance languages’.

Is it logically simpler in some ways to not have it? Of course. Let’s not even talk about how complex gendered verb conjugations are in Spanish or Portuguese, for example.

But it does allow a lot of beautiful flourishes that add a lot of color.

But my friends and in the LGBT+ communities chat groups I only see people using the x and @.

Grammatical gender is not intrinsically sexist and doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you try to analyze it to tease out what patriarchs were thinking when they added these forms, because largely they never thought about it at all. The forms evolved over hundreds of years.

If you look up the list of exceptions to the whole "-a = feminine, -o = masculine" in Spanish, it's incredibly long (and covers many of the most common words). Similarly there are a whole bunch where the gender is correct, but the article is swapped because it sounds better. The gender of specific words is also arbitrary, and doesn't agree between the various Romance languages.

This whole thing is just the leftover pieces of Latin's 3x linguistic genders hanging around in our languages, and ceased to be related to actual gender centuries ago.

And they are also catching up on feminism. Until recently here in Spain a woman would have to prove there had been violence when claiming rape. There was a big headline-making case where some rapists went free (well until supreme court appeal): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Manada_rape_case It led to the "only yes is yes" law which was already prevalent in other countries.

I'm Dutch myself and I hate many things in Dutch culture. Especially those stemming from the calvinist influences. It's one of the reasons I don't live there anymore.