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Ahead of the Latin American debut of FX’s gender-bending series, Pose, Fox Premium took on a daunting task: it decided to change the entire Spanish language.
In recent years, LGBTQ people and feminists have denounced Spanish as sexist because the language’s grammar forces all plural words to be masculine, discounting women and transgender people as a result. In response, these groups began to promote use of a more gender-neutral Spanish, spelling words such as “todos” (all) with an “e” to make it “todes.”
When Fox Premium was launching Pose, which stars more than 120 transgender actors and actresses, it wrote the Spanish-language subtitles accordingly. To do that, the service worked with LGBTQ and feminist associations to analyze the show scene by scene and choose words accordingly.
The idea ultimately positioned Fox Premium as Latin America’s first television and streaming brand to support gender-neutral Spanish, generating wide acceptance among its target audience and minorities, as well as great visibility in the Spanish-language newspapers and news media. The decision also re-ignited the debate on gender diversity throughout Latin America.
In the end, Pose added one more history-making first to its list: becoming the first series to dare to change the rules of Spanish.