After years of debate, some would argue centuries, the Swedish government plans to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun. The pronoun, “Hen,” will be used to refer to a person’s gender without revealing their gender either because, according to the Guardian.com, “It is unknown, because the person is transgender, or the speaker or writer deems the gender to be superfluous information.” The article went on to say that: “The word “hen” was coined in the 1960s when the ubiquitous use of “han” (he) became politically incorrect, and was aimed at simplifying the language and avoiding the clumsy “han/hon” (s/he) construction. But the word never really took hold. It resurfaced around 2000, when the country’s small transgender community latched on to it, and its use has taken off in the past few years. It can now be found in official texts, court rulings, media texts and books, and has begun to lose some of its feminist-activist connotation.”
But a discussion over the need for a gender-neutral word goes far back. According to Dennis Barons’s blog The Web of Language, the idea for one has gone on now for almost two hundred years, an ongoing back-and-forth between those coiners of a new term and the “English stalwarts” who reject, ridicule or just ignore every successive proposal. Writing as recently as June, 2009, London’s Daily Mail observed:
“It never ceases to infuriate me, for example, that in this cornucopia of a million words, there’s no simple, gender-neutral pronoun standing for ‘he-or-she’.
That means we either have to word our way round the problem by using plurals —which don’t mean quite the same thing—or we’re reduced to the verbose and clunking construction: ‘If an MP steals taxpayers’ money, he or she should be ashamed of himself or herself.’ (‘Themselves’, employed to stand for a singular MP, would, of course, be a grammatical abomination).
None other than Napoleon Bonapart Brown argued in The Atlantic (Nov, 1878) that the need for a new pronoun is “so desperate, urgent, imperative that . . . it should long since have grown on our speech,” allowing us to refer to both genders while sparing us from coordinating he or she, his or her, and him or her.
Had he lived, and lived in Sweden, he’d have gotten his wish.
