Precisely. It is “el género no binario” or “la persona no binaria”. It has nothing to do with the person, just the nouns. As “binario/a” is an adjective, it has no gender on its own.
This legitimately trips up learners. How if the noun is female, it’s correct to use feminine articles/pronouns/etc regardless of the person’s gender, even if you know they’re male. (or vice-versa).
It might be, you know, hear me out, that “grammatical gender” is a historical misnomer caused by linguistics initially practically only looking at Indo-European languages, which tend to have three noun classes with the word for “woman”, “man”, and “thing” all being in a different category so they became known as feminine, masculine, and neuter, with words assigned to them pseudo-randomly via phonetics. But really noun classes are a much more general thing, Bantu languages have up to 20. Persons, fruits, plants, locations, such things.
At least in Indo-European languages it’s mostly about ease of reference: “I see a cup and a table. She is broken”. Assuming that cup is female and table male (as in German) that is a very clear and concise statement.
Precisely. It is “el género no binario” or “la persona no binaria”. It has nothing to do with the person, just the nouns. As “binario/a” is an adjective, it has no gender on its own.
This legitimately trips up learners. How if the noun is female, it’s correct to use feminine articles/pronouns/etc regardless of the person’s gender, even if you know they’re male. (or vice-versa).
That and plurals defaulting to male.
Just be careful, because the person can be the noun, then the adjective takes on the person’s desired gender.
It might be, you know, hear me out, that “grammatical gender” is a historical misnomer caused by linguistics initially practically only looking at Indo-European languages, which tend to have three noun classes with the word for “woman”, “man”, and “thing” all being in a different category so they became known as feminine, masculine, and neuter, with words assigned to them pseudo-randomly via phonetics. But really noun classes are a much more general thing, Bantu languages have up to 20. Persons, fruits, plants, locations, such things.
At least in Indo-European languages it’s mostly about ease of reference: “I see a cup and a table. She is broken”. Assuming that cup is female and table male (as in German) that is a very clear and concise statement.
Except when referring to a group of women. Like “Dos profesoras”
As someone currently learning, this is really useful to know
And if the noun is a person’s name? Then how do you determine whether to use the masculine or feminine version of non-binary?
The current proposal is to use an “e” ending. “mi amigue Charlie es no binarie”.
I think the default or mixed gender plural is the masculine io ending. Them’s the rules of Spanish, as I was taught.