I'm seeing a lot of people critizicing (rightly so) the usage the x in random English such as womxn or y'xll to express "gender neutrality", but I haven't seen anyone yet explain why exactly it doesn't make any sense.
I think the trend of putting an x in these words was something English speakers decided to imitate from latines when they saw us writing words like latinx, todxs, chicxs, etc. The difference is that in latin languages, the usage of the x actually has a porpouse and a meaning. If you speak or know the basics of any latin language you'll probably already know this, but for those of you who don't, I'm going to try to explain it:
I'm going to use Spanish as a model example since it's the language most latines speak. In Spanish, literally all adjectives and nouns are gendered. The gender may be expressed with a male or female article, or in the word itself with the usage of an O for male and an A for female. So, for example, if you wanted to say beautiful, in Spanish that would translate to hermosO if you were speaking about a man and hermosA if you were speaking about a woman. Grammatically speaking, it's literally impossible to express beautiful in a gender neutral way. And it's the same case with literally every single adjective or noun. That's the reason latinx was born in the first place. The x was created to express gender neutrality, so that latines who didn't feel comfortable being called either latinO (male) or latinA (female) would have a word that could represent them.
Not only that, in Spanish, when we're speaking in the plural form, we always have to use the male terminology. So for example, if you want to say "they are beautiful", in Spanish this would be "ellOs (male) son hermosOs (male)" even if there are women or nb people in that group! As you can imagine, having male terminology as the default isn't something women and nb people are happy about since it seems like we're always being erased from the conversation. That's why the alternative of the x was created as well, so that when se speak in plural, we're speaking in gender neutral terms as well: "ellxs son hermosxs".
So as you can see, the x doesn't express gender neutrality just because. It has a grammatical and linguistic explanation behind. And other languages which don't have gendered terms, like English, have no real need of dropping an x in the middle of words to express gender neutrality.
Also I think it's really important to highlight that in recent years the usage of the x has been replaced with an e. This is because pronouncing an x is impossible and also to meet the needs of people with certain disabilities that found its usage unhelpful or uncomfortable.

















