“We have all these strategies to try to be inclusive and they come from a really nice place,” Fielding says, “but what they end up doing is creating different problems.” How popular is “folx” actually? More recently, there’s been the proposal for the spelling “Latine,” a gender-neutral term that actually works in the Spanish language and is more similar to “Latino” and “Latina.” In practice, it’s been more of a term “applied from without,” says Fielding, because the new spelling isn’t even pronounceable in Spanish. “‘Latinx’ is something that a lot of people use, but not necessarily folks who are actually in the community,” Fielding says. The term “Latinx” is another example of a language innovation that didn’t quite stick the landing. “But trans women are women, so you don’t have to do anything like that.” “If you put an ‘x’ there, it’s meant to say we want to include all sorts of people who might fall under the umbrella of woman,” she says. Swapping the “y” for an “x” was initially meant to reclaim that alternative spelling, but Fielding says that many feel it still falls short. While it was initially intended as pushback against defining womanhood in relation to men-“womyn” removes the words “man” and “men” from the spelling-it has now lost most of its original meaning and is most closely associated with gender essentialists, or people who reject gender fluidity. The term “womxn,” for example, is sometimes read as a reference to “womyn” with a “y,” “which ended up being a spelling that a lot of trans-exclusionary folks used” in the early waves of feminism, Fielding explains. And for some queer people, the use of the “x” and other alternative spellings have sometimes been controversial. The queer lexicon is constantly shape-shifting-whether it’s the spelling of a word or a new word entirely, the vocabulary used by this community often doesn’t look the same from year to year or even day to day. “Although ‘folks’ is already a gender-inclusive phrase, adding ‘x’ to it, for some people, signals a more explicit inclusiveness of people in the LGBTQIA+ community.” “It originates with the way we use ‘x’ in algebra to stand for the unknown or possibilities,” they say.

Sexuality educator Elise Schuster says the queer use of the letter “x” has long been associated with inclusivity. As the LGBTQ+ movement has grown, the “x” has found popularity yet again, this time in queer circles. Malcolm X famously adopted the letter in place of Little, the last name of a slave owner that his ancestors had been forced to bear. It was popularized in the ’60s and ’70s by Black liberation activists and early feminists. The use of alternate spellings, especially the letter “x,” has a particular significance in radical, progressive spaces.

What does the “x” mean to the queer community? It’s a wink to the queer community, like a flag or a pin, to demonstrate that you’re a safe, accepting presence-either an ally or a queer person yourself. But with the word “folks,” which, as Fielding points out, has no gender to begin with, the “x” is less a sign of neutrality and more an active stance. This is how you get terms like “womxn,” “Mx,” and “Latinx,” all of which have grown (and in some cases, waned) in popularity over the past several decades. The LGBTQ+ community has adopted the letter “x” as a tool to adhere gender neutrality onto otherwise gendered words. The letter ‘x’ is an orthographic symbol that has become synonymous with gender inclusivity.” “Why not ‘folks’? They are pronounced the same way, and both folx and folks are gender-neutral ways to refer to groups of people. “You might also notice that I employ the word ‘folx’ throughout the text,” she wrote. In the first edition of her book Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments, sex educator Lucie Fielding dedicated a paragraph to this mystifying term. Folx is the deliberate queerification of a word meant to differentiate queer spaces and groups from the non-queer. And while “folx” may seem like a handy abbreviation when you don’t feel like typing out the “k” and the “s” (I get it, you’re busy, we all need shortcuts sometimes), it’s actually a popular stand-in for the word “folks” used by queer-identifying people to refer to groups of other queer-identifying people. Maybe you’ve seen the word “folx” on Twitter and written it off as a typo or a new bit of texting shorthand that the kids are using these days. 'Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below.'

Folx instead of folks