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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Excellent Read: ‘In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism’

Excellent Read: ‘In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism’

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Cody Johnson is the man J.D. Vance pretended to be. If you use the link below, this should be a ‘gift’ (no paywall) story:

BEULAH, Ga. — As he pulled into the parking lot of Beulahland Baptist Church on Election Day last month, nearly everything about Cody Johnson suggested he would vote a certain way.

He was White. He was 33. He was an electrician with no college degree. He had a beard and a used pickup with 151,000 miles, and he was angry at what the country was becoming. Most of all, he was from northwest Georgia, a swath of rural America where people who looked like him had voted in large majorities to send Donald Trump to the White House and Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress, many of them swept up in the emotional appeal at the heart of the Trump movement, which Greene now deployed in her own rallies…

Now he took a last inhale on his vape, walked into the polling place and voted against all of that. He voted against Greene, whom he called “an embarrassment.” He voted against the Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, because he didn’t want “some stupid s— to happen.” He voted against every single Republican on the ballot for the same reason he supported Joe Biden in 2020, which had been the first time he voted in his life.

“I don’t want extremists in office,” he said, walking back to his truck. “And I have some small glimmer of hope that maybe things aren’t as screwed up as I think they are.”

All across the country, a similar uprising was underway as an unexpected tide of people showed up for midterm elections, turning what was supposed to be a rout for the Republican Party into a repudiation of Trumpism. In Arizona, voters rejected candidates who embraced white nationalist ideas and conspiracy theories about election fraud. In Pennsylvania, they rejected a candidate who said America is a Christian nation. Similar results had rolled in from New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia and other states including Georgia, where Walker would lose in a runoff earlier this month. Even in the deep-red 14th Congressional District, Greene saw her winning margin from 2020 slip by 10 percentage points, and one reason was Cody Johnson…

[When Johnson first left home] He was 15. He spent weeks on this floor or that couch in the homes of friends. He spent as much time as he could in the library, where one day he came upon a pocket-size book whose broken binding, dog-eared pages and rows of checkout stamps made him think it must be as important as any Bible, and so he began reading the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher of self-reliance.

“I remember he said something about the great men of history are no greater than you,” he said…

He graduated from high school. He told the librarian he wanted to keep the Emerson essays, and she did not resist. He enlisted in the Army and got posted to South Korea, where he remembers how it felt telling fellow soldiers about his life for the first time, and looking out his window at the vast city of Daegu, thinking, “I could be on the side of the mountain right now, and I’m glad to be where I am.”

He returned home to northwest Georgia and started a life in which he tried to live according to his own moral compass. He got married. He had a daughter. He tried to help his mom out with money when he could. He became a union electrician and mentored apprentices. He avoided church, which he came to see as a death cult. He avoided politics, too, because he did not want to take part in a system that had only two parties, both of which he saw as geared toward helping the powerful instead of regular people like him and everyone he grew up around, from Jasper to Fairmount to Rydal. “There’s so much that could be done to help people,” he said. But after Trump was elected, and then Greene, politics became almost impossible to ignore…

[W]hat was most insulting to him of all was the assumption that he would go along with all of it because of how he looked and where he lived. He started to feel like a spy. He had neighbors who made him aware of a bar near his house that was supposedly a gathering place for people in the white nationalist movement. He got a Facebook invitation to join some militia group, which he blocked. He had White co-workers who flagrantly used the n-word and made racist comments to him, and he came to enjoy their shock when he told them to cut it out.
 
“It was disgusting that people might think I was okay with that,” he said. “I decided I wasn’t going to just let it slide. Because if you let it slide, you become complicit, and complicity turns into guilt, and guilt turns into shame, and shame turns into fear, and I don’t want to live in fear.”…

Sometimes he and his wife discussed how the Trump movement had ever taken root in this place they loved, and sometimes hated, and nonetheless had chosen to make their home.

“The hardest part is the juxtaposition of knowing these are good, kind, loving, caring people here,” Johnson’s wife would say. “It’s like they put their morality in a box.”

To Johnson, though, it was less about other people and more about the kind of person he wanted to be. And so when it was time to vote again — this time in Georgia’s Dec. 6 runoff for the U.S. Senate — he got into his pickup truck and headed to Beulahland Baptist Church one more time.

He walked across the parking lot, past other pickup trucks and cars with Trump stickers, and through the door. And then a 33-year-old White man from northwest Georgia voted for the third time in his life.

He voted against the Trump-backed candidate, and as he saw it, he voted against all the politics of Trumpism that had been expected to work on somebody like him — white nationalism, grievance, bitterness, bullying and, perhaps most of all, fear of a changing world.

“I have relatives who retreated rather than adapted,” he said, thinking of the life he left behind. “I think of it as, I left the mountain to come into the world, to go out into the world. It’s something I’m kind of proud of.”

Reader Interactions

113Comments

  2. 2.

    bbleh

    Good article, happy they “discovered” him, and happier still that they made him seem like a good guy and not a freak.

    And I think there really are a LOT of people like him, as suggested by pretty much every election from the Kansas abortion vote to the Georgia Senate runoff.  I think the Trump/MTG/Gaetz Asshole-American brand has finally made it onto the radar screens of a LOT of Americans, and a lot of them don’t like what they see.

    BUT … there still are a lot who DO like what they see, who think it’s not just okay but virtuous, who want to emulate it, even violently, and still vote for people like Trump/MTG/Gaetz et al.

    Johnson is still an outlier in his district.  And the majority still are very much in a mood.  Now is not the time to let up.

  3. 3.

    Betsy

    This is great to read. It rings familiar. I know PLENTY of white, southern men who rejoice in surprising folks with their liberalism.  One of them is my dad.  He likes to catch people off guard and I think he enjoys being one of the tiny handful of ancient white guys born in rural Miss. in the early 20th c. that votes left/Dem, always.

    Let me state though that he and I would be the first to admit (proclaim!) that Black women are the heart and soul, BRAINS, HANDS and FEET of the modern Democratic Party.

  4. 4.

    Alison Rose

     

    The second was his elementary school principal, a woman Johnson’s wife, Aliya, now refers to as “one of those blessed souls,” who noticed that he got in trouble all the time, and instead of punishing him, gave him the first book he ever read, “The Hobbit.”

    “I remember there were all these themes about fighting the Dark Lord,” Johnson said, recalling how engrossed he became in stories of characters and their moral dilemmas, which had the effect of making him think about his own.

    This made me even happier than the Emerson pic.

    Also, the part about not letting racist and bigoted shit slide…yeah. A lot of people could use that lesson

    ETA:

    “There was this well-dressed fellow,” he recalled. “He was pleasant, and as we were leaving, he said, ‘We’ve got to keep them demon Democrats from stealing the election.’ He thought he knew how I was going to vote because of my skin color. I said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘Nah. And just so you know, I just canceled you out. So, suck on that.’”

    Hell yeah.

  13. 13.

    hells littlest angel

    I subscribe to the Post, and while it has its share of terrible contributors — mostly, by far, on the opinion pages — it’s really a pretty good paper, probably the best daily in the country.

  14. 14.

    HinTN

    @Suzanne: I suspect he has people. You don’t live in the mountains without them, no matter how few and far between.

    This is a very encouraging piece of reporting from WaPo.

    @raven: I am truly sorry I missed this from you. I blame holiday brain fog.

    ETA: He’s not a fucking rebel, as WaPo captions him. He’s an American!

  17. 17.

    Another Scott

    Good for him. And, of course, he is not alone. The Google machine tells me:

    Georgia · District 14
    99% reporting

    Marjorie Taylor Greene
    Republican Party 65.9% 170,003 votes

    Marcus Flowers
    Democratic Party 34.1% 88,074 votes

    Even in the reddest areas, there are people who don’t buy into the nonsense, who aren’t monsters, who do support Democrats and unions and sensible policies.

    The press lets us down by putting everyone in boxes – political, social, ethnic, age, etc, etc. Of course, averages and trends matter, and majorities do and should rule (with protections for fair process and the minority), but we’re so much more than a bunch of averages and 50%+1 collections. It’s lazy of the press to Twitter-ify the complexity of our ever-changing reality.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  18. 18.

    Miss Bianca

    @Suzanne: Completely off-topic, was it you who was talking about Superstition Meadery the other day? I am sipping on some of their product right now that one of our neighbors brought back from Prescott. It’s mighty tasty!

  20. 20.

    rivers

    Thank you for posting this. It’s a wonderful story in that the writer didn’t just focus on the politics but made clear how he came to be the man who voted as he did. What I loved the most were the stories of the people who influenced him – his grandmother who always seemed happy to see him, his mother who reprimanded him when he used a racial slur, the elementary school principal who gave him “The Hobbit” but also the vegan grandfather of a friend who made him realize there was another way to be. Even all the readers of Emerson in the library who made him curious about a book that so many people had read and turned down the pages of before he picked it up, every single one of those people made him see things differently from so many of his contemporaries. This goes way beyond those “diner” stories that the NYT specialized in – this is real writing.

  22. 22.

    rikyrah

     

    Well,it wasn’t a window🙄🙄😒😒

    John FitzGerald (@TheTweetOfJohn) tweeted at 9:53 AM on Thu, Dec 29, 2022:
    Alexi Maslow, former commander-in-chief of Russia’s ground forces, dropped dead ‘unexpectedly’ in a military hospital this week. No cause of death was given. He’s the second bigwig in the country’s military industrial complex to die in just two days. https://t.co/4RAoNbWrbu
    (https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfJohn/status/1608491518914088964?s=02)

  23. 23.

    Kent

    I knew a lot of guys like this in Texas.  Mostly Hispanic, but 3rd or 4th generation, often ex military, raising families, living in the burbs or exurbs or even rural areas, working hard in the trades, etc.  A lot of the guys I coached soccer with and against more or less fit this definition.

    They are inclined to vote for reasonable conservatives like Bush or Romney but can’t stomach the racist crazy and are gettable by the Democratic party if it focuses on economics, jobs, healthcare, etc. and not the “defund the police” type bullshit.  And don’t fucking use Latinx around them, ESPECIALLY if you are white.  That comes across as equal parts patronizing and dipshittery

    They tend to be smarter than their white blue collar counterparts in Texas who are much more likely to embrace the politics of resentment which is where most of the crazy really comes from.

  28. 28.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    This is the most hopeful and uplifting article I’ve read in many months.  It would be great if Cody Johnson’s story could have some sort of Johnny Appleseed effect on other folks that are on the fence.

  29. 29.

    Starfish

    @raven: I only read the internet, and I will have you know that Greta Thunberg just kicked some jerk so hard through the internet that he ended up in a Romanian jail.

  30. 30.

    tobie

    The article reminded me of this story from Politico: “2022 Is the Year We All Finally Got Tired of Narcissists.” The premise is that people have had enough of needy narcissists from Trump to Elizabeth Holmes to Elon Musk who crave attention and whose overinflated egos make them think they can do anything when all they do is tear things down. The writer has an odd fixation with Megan Markle that I don’t get…mostly because I’ve never had any interest in the royal family whatsoever. This quibble aside, I do think there’s something about the outrage machine that people found exhausting and insufferable and it drove once politically unaligned folks to the polls.

  31. 31.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Starfish: I was just catching up on that. Done in by a pizza box and his small dick energy temper tantrum

    Eta: not for nuthin, but every time i refresh the page, my edit counter starts over. Stuck edit function?

  33. 33.

    ColoradoGuy

    @Kent: No reason these folks can’t be Truman Democrats. Not into performative stuff, but very interested in a better working life for them and their families.

    Right down the middle for Biden and 95% of the party.

  34. 34.

    Brachiator

    He spent as much time as he could in the library, where one day he came upon a pocket-size book whose broken binding, dog-eared pages and rows of checkout stamps made him think it must be as important as any Bible, and so he began reading the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher of self-reliance.

    Somebody should make sure that library has a few copies of Emerson.

  35. 35.

    FelonyGovt

    OT my 80 year old neighbor is being taken advantage of a woman she befriended years ago. The friend has all my neighbor’s account and password info, her SSN, and recently had a will and powers of attorney made up whereby my neighbor leaves all her assets to the friend, cutting out her 2 children. (Fortunately she didn’t sign these.) I advised her as best I could, but she’s kind of vague and confused. It’s really distressing.

  36. 36.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    I read the article weeks ago, and it just resonated with me.  I was born and raised in Virginia, and while I have a graduate degree, thus over educated, being a Southern Waspy looking person makes way too many people assume I believe a certain way.  As most of you know, my husband died in October at age 66.  Way too many people think I believe as a Southern Protestant does, so they say to me, you’ll be reunited in heaven.  My standard reply is that unless Heaven makes us look like we did in our 20’s, I’m not sure I want that deal.  Shuts them up fast.

  39. 39.

    AliceBlue

    @Cheryl from Maryland: That reminds me of an old family story about my grandmother.  She and a neighbor were having a disagreement about some religious something or other and my grandmother was told that she wasn’t going to heaven.  She replied “well, if people like you are going to be there I don’t want to go.”  Shut that lady up real quick.  I’ve been told the same thing a couple of times in my life and that line still works.

  41. 41.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @FelonyGovt:

    I also told her to make a report with the police.

    If you’re comfortable doing so, I’d call the police, they can at least put you in touch with some kind of agency, senior services is a thing, no? Or more precisely, put some authority or agency in touch with her, and then the ‘friend’

  44. 44.

    brendancalling

    There are a lot of those guys out there, but the media typically doesn’t go looking for them.

  48. 48.

    Geminid

    I was struck by one particular aspect of the Cody Johnson story: he is a reader, and he is a reader of science fiction and fantasy. This is an intellectual trait that seems to exist across many social and cultural divisions. It may be a result of Johnson’s nonconformity or a cause of it, or maybe it’s both.

    But leaving aside questions of cause and effect, this kind of reading material can contribute to an outsider’s point of view, and that is something I think we can all benefit from.

  49. 49.

    Steeplejack

    @tobie:

    The author of that Politico piece, Joanna Weiss, got dragged up and down the Internet for including Meghan Markle in that narcissists’ pantheon, and it came out that she has written a number of articles on Markle—all negative—in several publications.

  51. 51.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @Steeplejack: Count me as another person who believes (with a lot of evidence) that Meghan Markle is a narcissist.  Also lies about as much as TFG, sadly.

  52. 52.

    chrisanthemama

    @FelonyGovt: Does she have a bank account, and do you know where it is?  Bank employees are attuned to elder-abuse. Does she have a M.D?  They also are aware of elder-abuse, and both should be able to point you towards local resources. And the two children?  Can you make them aware, and get an attorney involved. Good for you for sticking your nose out, though.

  54. 54.

    Gin & Tonic

    President Joe tweeted an appreciation of the recently deceased Pele, including the phrase “Today, Jill and I’s thoughts are with his family…” Am I the only one appalled by this egregious construction?

  60. 60.

    Ohio Mom

    @FelonyGovt: I did a little goggling for you. This seems like a place to start: https://eldercare.acl.gov/Public/Index.aspx

    This site will help you find local resources for seniors with legal (and other) issues. Then you can bow out.

    As an aside, I joined AARP in order to use their Medicare Plan B and now I get two different magazines from them. Every issue there is an article best described as “Don’t let yourself get scammed.” I really did not fully appreciate how much seniors get taken advantage of before I saw how much attention AARP focuses on it.

  67. 67.

    Ohio Mom

    @Starfish: Yesterday it was some woman who is a real estate agent with a TikTok whose name I can’t remember, today it’s some guy named Andrew Tate, I never heard of either one, there are too many right wing creeps for me to keep up with.

    At least it sounds like Tate is going to jail.

  69. 69.

    Steeplejack

    @Another Scott:

    Last time I looked, Greta Thunberg’s tweet had 217 million views and 3.1 million likes. One commenter said (paraphrasing), “I used to think the worst kind of fame was fame for being famous, but now I know it’s fame for being owned on Twitter.”

  70. 70.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Kent: “And don’t fucking use Latinx around them, ESPECIALLY if you are white.”

    Transgender activist Diamond Stylez put it perfectly: (paraphrase) “Nobody is forcing YOU to use the term ‘Latinx.’  But WE are gonna use it to be inclusive of Trans/NB people in that community and if that bothers you, too fucking bad.”

    Whining about the use of “Latinx” is closely related to whining about pronouns.  In both cases it’s the Cisgender majorities who object to it, not the people who are continually erased and under attack.

  71. 71.

    columbusqueen

    @eclare: Yeah, I couldn’t believe that. Who the hell invites strangers to her wedding? I sure as hell wouldn’t.  Not to mention all of Markle’s new age approach to life with meditation etc. rubs me the wrong way. I just hope for Harry’s sake the marriage doesn’t blow up. If it does, he’ll be in a world of hurt after burning all his bridges.

  73. 73.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    @Steeplejack:

    The author of that Politico piece, Joanna Weiss, got dragged up and down the Internet for including Meghan Markle in that narcissists’ pantheon, and it came out that she has written a number of articles on Markle—all negative—in several publications.

    Given that Weiss was a regular panelist on Beat the Press, a program which examined media blunders, I find her own tone deafness ironic.

  74. 74.

    eclare

    @columbusqueen:   I think whether or not Harry’s family would take him back depends a lot on his upcoming book.  And I have to think whatever publisher paid around $20M for his memoir is going to want it to be juicy.

  79. 79.

    kalakal

    @Gin & Tonic: I saw a video of him once on a reddit facepalm thread. He came across as a failed try out for a part as a Bond villain.  The cheesy pose and lighting, the chin stroking, the third rate theatrics. I can’t remember what asinine bilge he was spouting, in fact he made such a shallow impression I’d forgotten him, but that video above brought it back . It’s pleasing to relate that even before today’s display of idiocy there were 1,000s of people who despised him deeply. A lot of the comments related to his mysogyny and criminality, but it was hard to get any detail. He seemed to have an extraordinarily inflated opinion of himself, the more striking as he seemed really rather stupid.

  80. 80.

    Starfish

    @Ohio Mom: Oh. I didn’t know who you were talking about from yesterday, but then I remembered. She was the lady running the libs of TikTok account that was basically targeting LGBTQ educators for harassment.

  81. 81.

    Alison Rose

    @kalakal:

    He seemed to have an extraordinarily inflated opinion of himself, the more striking as he seemed really rather stupid.

    A newsreel worth of names that this could apply to just started running through my brain.

  82. 82.

    Amir Khalid

    @Gin & Tonic:

    It’s a pity that your President doesn’t have a pedant around to help him with the tricky points of grammar, someone who could have whispered in his ear, “Jill’s thoughts and mine”.

    //

  83. 83.

    NaijaGal

    @tobie: Joanna Weiss (the writer) has received quite a bit of backlash from people who’ve pointed out that most of the people she listed conned people out of enormous amounts of money, fired people with no real justification, displayed horrible anti-semitism, or got people killed, except for Meghan Markle, who got a fair bit more of her attention in the piece than the others.

    The same writer commented in 2018 on how Camilla was “cheated” out of a lavish royal wedding when Meghan and Harry got married, so I think she definitely has Meghan derangement syndrome.

  84. 84.

    Steeplejack

    It looks like the pizza-box angle on the Andrew Tate arrest is getting debunked. I haven’t seen anything definitive yet. But the arrest is real.

  87. 87.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Steeplejack:

    It looks like the pizza-box angle on the Andrew Tate arrest is getting debunked. I haven’t seen anything definitive yet. But the arrest is real. 

    The arrest is really what matters.  The piece of shit, alleged sex-trafficking rapist…

  89. 89.

    Amir Khalid

    @NaijaGal:

    To the extent that I have considered it, Harry and Meghan’s decision to quit as working royals — to leave behind the toxic goldfish-bowl existence that did his mother in, compounded by the racism Meghan faced — seems to me no more and no less than an act of self-preservation. It is beyond me why they should be hated for that.

  92. 92.

    Suzanne

    @Amir Khalid: Agree.

    I also think that Charles and William suck, and Kate Middleton looks miserable in every picture, and I also think Camilla is the racist one.

  94. 94.

    Amir Khalid

    @Ksmiami:

    It’s really up to the British people to decide if/when the monarchy should end, and so far they seem happy enough with it. The rest of us should respect that.

  97. 97.

    columbusqueen

    @NaijaGal: So let’s settle in a country with even more crazy right wing racists who all have guns. Sorry, but even with threats I consider the UK to be safer than here.

  100. 100.

    Anne Laurie

    @columbusqueen: There’s some of us believe that Harry choosing a divorced, American, Black tv actress to marry was his decision — conscious or not — to get himself expelled from ‘The Firm’.

    He did know about Wallis Simpson and his Great-Uncle George, after all.

    Harry, remember, had been referred to as ‘The Spare’ since the moment he was born.  Once his older brother had successfully procreated, he was extremely supernumerary… in an organization publicly determined to cut back on excess employees.

    Choosing to marry Meghan, even assuming they had fallen in love with each other, was very much a You can’t fire me — I quit! announcement to his family / ’employer’.

    Camilla (and I’m quite willing to accede she’s as racist as her current husband) was much more a traditionalist.  She and Charles pretty clear have loved each other since they were both young, but she was willing to be his mistress and let The Firm choose an official brood mare for Charles’ wife.  As had been the custom for so many, many generations!

    Diana may have been in love with her romantic image of The Prince — or at least with her romantic fantasies of being The Princess — but that was, to say the least, bad planning on her part, poor silly woman.  Here’s hoping her son has better luck with his post-palace life…

  102. 102.

    Mo Salad

    @UncleEbeneezer: ​
     I actually disagree on this one. Most non-English languages have gendered nouns, including Spanish.

    To use Latinx, to neuter a noun, despite its good intentions, I believe is a low-grade form of cultural annihilation, or at least incredible tone-deafness, imposing Anglo standards onto others to serve Anglo purposes, however enlightened those purposes may be.

  103. 103.

    livewyre

    @Mo Salad: My impression has been that this one in particular developed among Latin American academics and was only later popularized in an Anglo-American political context. Of course that doesn’t necessarily make it non-imperialistic or approachable or even acceptable in general use, so no surprise or sweat if it fell flat. That’s activist language and its rough edges.

    I’ve heard “Latine” as a more pronounceable self-description among gender-equality activists but don’t consider myself qualified to comment on it outside of that context. There’s always work left to do in querying all forms of symbolic exclusion and seeing what progress there is to make without erasing what makes us distinct.

  104. 104.

    Baud

    @Mo Salad:

    @livewyre:

    My understanding is that “Latino” is sexist but not exclusive.  IOW, Latino signifies alll men and both men and women.  So it would cover trans and other gender designations.

    The problem word is “Latina,” which should only be used to signify all women.  I don’t know how native Spanish speakers deal with trans women when it comes to Latina.

  106. 106.

    livewyre

    @Baud: Sure, but even a presumably inclusive patriarchal default isn’t to everyone’s stomach, even if it can be claimed to be fully abstract from practice. I would make the case that our symbols should represent us rather than the other way around. My idea of activism is to get away from imposing something that doesn’t actually fit everyone no matter how much it’s supposed to.

    Sometimes we swing and miss, of course. I lack the context to go into particulars with regard to language. But the discussion in general is very much alive about how to represent gender status fully inclusively, which necessarily involves representation. The continuing invention of neutral terms by and among those most affected is indication enough to me of that.

  107. 107.

    Baud

    @livewyre:

    My idea of activism is to get away from imposing something that doesn’t actually fit everyone no matter how much it’s supposed to.

     

    That’s impossible to do when you have a common language. Some rule of grammer will be imposed on somebody who doesn’t like it.

  108. 108.

    trnc

    @Another Scott: The press lets us down by putting everyone in boxes – political, social, ethnic, age, etc, etc.

    IMHO, the press generally puts liberals in those boxes. Republicans get the full complexity treatment along the lines of “he’s a white supremacist, but he helps out in his church and listens to Wheezer.” Liberals are identified with whom they vote for and have no back story.

  110. 110.

    StringOnAStick

    @UncleEbeneezer: Until you posted this, I thought Latinx was just used to get around the fact that Spanish language is gendered, I had no idea it was supposed to only be used for trans/nb Hispanics and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

  111. 111.

    Geminid

    @StringOnAStick: That may be a more recent development. I think in the past “Latinx” was intended as a workaround for Spanish’s gendered nouns.

    When another commenter and I argued about the word a few months ago I looked to see how two politicians that I respect, both from the Spanish-speaking community, treated this question. I learned that Representatives Veronica Escobar and Ruben Gallego use the word Latino. I figure if that’s good enough for them it’s good enough for me.

  112. 112.

    El Cruzado

    @Baud: Answering as a native Spanish speaker, you’re right about the male form being all-inclusive and the female form being for exclusively female individuals/groups. A group of 20 women and one man should, grammatically speaking, use the male term 🤷🏽‍♂️

    That said, for trans people, the female term should be the one used to refer to trans women, either individually or as a group of exclusively them. Unless you’re a transphobe, which is definitely something that can be easily found in large numbers in Spanish-speaking countries 🤷🏽‍♂️. A group of 20 women and one trans man should use the male term as well 😅

    But within those rules the usage patterns follow the same nuances as they would in the English-speaking discourse.

  113. 113.

    tam1MI

    @Suzanne:

    Agree.

    I also think that Charles and William suck, and Kate Middleton looks miserable in every picture, and I also think Camilla is the racist one.

    And let’s not forget the Royal Rapist, currently being hugged to the family’s bosom while the only member of the royal family who served under fire for his country is cast out because he married a woman who’s skin wasn’t chalk white.

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