The power of the Latin neuter
An ancient language offers my nonbinary students something English does not.
For decades, on the first day of Latin class I have asked my students if they are a discipulus or a discipula. We then play with the plurals as I prompt them to figure out the difference in their first inflections.
This no longer feels appropriate in a classroom of students who have a more open awareness of gender identity, a significant number of whom opt to use non-gendered pronouns. So now I offer a third option, a fabricated nominative singular: discipulum. “Ne-uter,” I tell them. Not either. The Latin language had this figured out long before our clumsy English came along.
At first I was wary of presenting a word that they would not find in the compendium of Latin literature—a neither masculine nor feminine student—feeling as though I was stepping outside of my duty to preserve what was given to us by the ancients. It has, however, proven to be meaningful to demonstrate the potential this language has to be inclusive of those who do not identify on the gender binary that our own language largely follows.
