A very cheerful good morning to all.

Honorable juries/adjudicators, respected teachers, and my

fellow competitors. Today I would like to light my views supporting (if you are in favor)
/opposing (if you are against) the motion/topic (say your topic).”

“Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to talk to you today about exams. The exam system that we
have followed is the British system has been reformed many times. A big exam at the age of
eleven determined a child’s whole future.

Here, I will argue that the problem is that exams, besides being stressful, are ineffective in
assessing student learning.”

ADAPTATION OF THE USAGE OF LATINX AS A GENDER NEUTRAL TERM

Some may perceive Westernization or Modernization as an unfortunate reality, however,

it also initiates good results and benefits. In the context of the adaptation of Latinx, Filipinx is
likewise a necessity for the third culture children

Filipinx is not an attempt to “erase and change the Filipino culture and identity.” It is only an addition for the third
culture Filipinos to build a community with a common ideal they can cling to: an open and accepting Filipino
diaspora. It is extremely relevant especially when racial and gender issues are highly contested in other countries like
the United States.

I don’t see “Filipinx” as an attempt to “erase and change our culture.” I just see third culture kids trying to establish
some sort of community with a common ideal they can all cling to: an open and accepting Filipino diaspora. The word
“Filipinx” may not be relevant to Filipinos in the Philippines, but it is relevant to the members of the diaspora living in
countries like the U.S.A. where racial issues and gender labels are hotly contested. Context is everything.

Each taxonomic label betrays a plurality or heterogeneity within it. Will a new label capture the denied or negated
essence of the group, whatever that may be? From American Negroes to Afro-Americans to African Americans to
Black Lives—the changes seem to reflect not an unchanging essence. They in fact capture the distinctive impact of
historical changes, both the socioeconomic and political events involving those groups and the responses of the
communities. The same goes with the invention of “Pinoys” and “Pinays” to designate Filipinos abroad, in the United
States and elsewhere. These changes register the groups’ need to identify themselves as a distinctive community for
economic, political and cultural adaptation and survival. (https://cenpeg.org/2020/10-0CT-
2020/PROBLEMATIZING_THE_NAME_FILIPINX_A%20Colloquy.html )
HOW FILIPINOS ARE CALLED THROUGHOUT HISTORY
What’s the historical specificity of Filipinos here and in the Philippines? When President McKinley decided to annex
the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War (1898-99), he had no clue where those islands were. The
Filipino revolutionary government established a republic, but U.S. superior arms won and colonized the country. Due
to the need for labor, the colonized Filipinos were recruited for the Hawaiian sugar plantations as “nationals,” in
short, colonial subalterns, not immigrants. The “Manilla men” who fled the Spanish galleons in the 18th century were
not “Filipinos,” strictly speaking, but “Indios,” so these Mayflower “wannabes” cannot yet be accepted into ‘the
melting pot”—“e pluribus unum” is just an aspirational come-on.

In 1908, the Grove Farm Plantation in Kauai, Hawaii listed “Filipinos” after “fertilizer” as one of the commodities
ordered (Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 1989, p. 25). The “Manongs”—Filipino farmworkers—
spread from Hawaii to Alaska until the “little brown brother” bore the violence of the white vigilantes in Watsonville,
California, in 1929 for mixing with white women. Filipinos were called “Flips.” They were classified as “Mongolians,”
not Malays, until Salvador Roldan challenged the court so he could marry his white fiancee. When the U.S. troops
slaughtered Filipino soldiers of the Republic during the Filipino-American War (1899-1913), the natives were called
“Niggers,” “khaki ladrones,” and other colorful epithets. More horrendous were the massacres of Muslim Filipinos,
whom we now call BangsaMoro, in Mindanao and Sulu that Mark Twain bewailed as barbaric piratical adventures.
Are these tendentious names just symptoms of paranoia, the hostile imagination of the warrior psyche? Part of the
strategy to dehumanize the enemy, these modes of stigmatizing by name-calling aim to exonerate the agents of
genocide from guilt or blame—after all, you are fighting for democracy and Christian civilization.
(https://cenpeg.org/2020/10-0CT-2020/PROBLEMATIZING_THE_NAME_FILIPINX_A%20Colloquy.html )

Meanwhile, let us hear from a Filipino academic in the Philippines, Charlie Samuya Veric, professor of English at
Ateneo de Manila University, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Veric has written several
books of poetry and a pioneering work on postcolonial studies in the Philippines entitled Children of the Postcolony.
He wrote in FB:

Filipino and Filipinx are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they both need to flourish. But if one cancels the other, then
that’s where the problem begins. Filipino is founded on identification with the Philippine nation whereas Filipinx dis-
identify themselves from the heteronormative and white supremacist American state. There’s a crucial difference
between identifying with a young Philippine nation and distancing oneself from the long imperial history of the US.
So if we force Filipinx on Filipinos in the Philippines, that creates more trouble than needed. Give the Filipino nation
its time in the sun. Let it grow and mature first. Then we can start denying it. One cannot deconstruct what is not fully
constructed.

(next)
I’d like to suggest that “Filipinx” itself is a term that has yet to mature—a term that signals that we live in “new times
= new politics.” While the term “Filipino” is rooted in a very long history of mass struggle against U.S. imperialism
(an “old” mode of political engagement), “Filipinx” is quite recent and rooted in contemporary U.S. identity politics...
an intersectional politics of diversity and inclusion... a contemporary queer politics that oftentimes privilege trans
visibility over a systemic critique of racism, militarism, and materialism (the three evils critiqued by MLK).
(next)
But after some thinking, I came to a conclusion that Filipinx is just an evolved version of Filipino, and an adaptation
to the current needs of its speakers, including the freedom of nonbinary folk to express themselves without feeling
erased.
This evolve-and-adapt mechanism in language always happens. It’s the same mechanism that birthed dialects or
sociolect, like, gayspeak or conyo. For all we know, the term Filipinx may be part of the Filipino-American diaspora
sociolect, and it serves its purposes for them. And if native Filipinos use Filipinx too, so what? A sociolect doesn’t
entail exclusivity. If it was, those who don’t identify as part of the LGBTQ+ shouldn’t be able to talk Filipino gayspeak,
like the notable “charot” or “jowa”, to name a few.

SUFFIX “-X” DOES NOT EXIST IN THE PHILIPPINE LINGUISTIC SYSTEM

It was an article critiquing the use of “Filipinx” in Bulatlat by Prof. John Toledo of the University of the Philippines,
Los Baños that piqued Delia D. Aguilar's interest in pursuing the matter. She had wrongly assumed that Filipinos in
the Philippines would accede to this modification that, after all, signified solidarity with another US community of
color. Instead, Toledo urged his readers to "resist such adverse essentializing of our identity." He ends his criticism
with a plea: "We, the Filipino virtual community, have to resist this Western hype and empower our languages in the
Philippines. We are all Filipinos. Isn't it much more important today to battle the rhetoric that our mother nation is a
province of another nation?"

Filipinxs also share a similar history as Spain began colonial conquest of the Philippine archipelago in 1521 and as
colonization almost completely eradicated indigenous cultural practices, spirituality, and language and replaced
indigenous practices with Spanish patriarchy, Christianity, and sweepingly gendered relations throughout the islands.

To this point, Spanish gendered prescriptions manifested in many words, whereas native dialects had no gender
markers, and pronouns were siya or sila (essentially they/them). The adoption of the “x” by members in the Filipino
American community is an attempt at inclusivity and breaking past the binary of gendered markers imposed by
colonization. It is also important to note that this is a very specific characteristic of conscious Filipino American
communities and not necessarily adopted by Filipinos in the Philippines, nor broadly in the United States. Thus
Filipinx should be seen as synonymous with Filipina or Filipino, without the gendered prescription, and we should
not try to play “woke” olympics with each other.
Purist may resist this attempt to problematize the Filipinx identity with an X, and while the writers acknowledge
shifting language helps continue to sharpen our understanding of inequities therefore facilitate a clearer path to
genuine equity, we also know that a change in nomenclature is just that, an empty change in terminology, unless
genuine liberation of the oppressed is obtained and equity and justice is systematized institutionally, and in the
context of Filipinx history, including genuine liberation of the Philippines from uneven neocolonial political,
economic and military policies.

(next)
Also, “Filipinx” seems to be inspired by the shift to “Latinx.” The eagerness of Fil-Ams to adopt the “Filipinx”
identity/category (to copy our Latino/as/x sisters and brothers) is symptomatic of a deep (and painful) desperation
among many Fil-Ams to be “seen” and “heard” in the United States (among U.S. BIPOC activists, within the U.S.
academy and its publishing venues, within mass media)... so much energy around the “x” just to get a slice of the pie.