Can a coined gender-neutral pronoun reduce sexism? A recent study by Margit Tavits and Efrén O. Pérez published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is optimistic that it can. According to Tavits and Pérez, now that the new, ungendered Swedish pronoun hen is official, Swedes will be more open to women in public life and more likely to support the rights of LGBT people. Except that hen is not really official in any meaningful sense, plus Sweden was already socially progressive decades before hen gained prominence.
Nonetheless, the media response to this study has been enthusiastic: Business Insider gushes, “It’s already changing the way people think,” and the Guardian explains that hen “reduces mental biases that favour men, and boosts positive feelings towards women and LGBT people.”
It’s an attractive myth: a simple part of speech is turning Sweden into a gender-forward paradise. But a closer look shows that hen isn’t quite so powerful.
For one thing, the Swedish government isn’t promoting any pronouns, gendered or not, and even if it could declare an official pronoun, just as governments declare an official flower or a national anthem, changing masculine han and feminine hon to gender-neutral hen won’t change reality. And for another, it took hen fifty years to even get noticed. In the meantime, without a gender-neutral pronoun, Swedish women were already achieving parity with men and Swedish society was becoming more open to LGBT people.
The story of hen
As pronouns go, hen is relatively new. The linguist Rolf Dunås coined hen in 1966, on the model of Finnish hän—Finnish pronouns do not indicate gender. Dunås thought that hen would be a useful addition to Swedish to be used when gender was unknown or irrelevant, and also because the increasing prominence of women in public life was rendering the old generic masculine much less appropriate. Hen, midway between the Swedish han and hon, would replace the compound han eller hon, ‘he or she,’ which Dunås called pedantic and clumsy, or han/hon, ‘him/her,’ which he thought was even worse. He also suggested extending the neuter pronoun den, similar to English it, as an alternative to hen.
Hen didn’t catch on in 1966 and hen remained obscure even after the linguist Hans Karlgren revived it in 1994. Karlgren believed that the generic use of the Swedish masculine han worked well enough to satisfy “even the most militant feminists,” though he offered no data to back up that claim. He did suggest that hen would be a useful way to avoid ambiguity—an admission on his part that the generic masculine was not working very well after all.
Despite Karlgren’s support, hen continued to be ignored until 2012, when the writer Jesper Lundqvist used hen for the gender-ambiguous protagonist in his children’s book, Kivi och Monsterhund, “Kivi and the Monsterdog.” The protagonist in that story, the gender-ambiguous Kivi, refuses to go to bed until hen gets a dog. Kivi’s exasperated relatives promise that hen may have a dog, but only if hen goes to sleep. The “monster” dog turns out to be not what Kivi expected.
The reaction to hen was not what Lundqvist expected, either. Some readers praised the new pronoun: it made Kivi not a girls’ book or a boys’ book, but one that appealed to any three year old fighting sleep. But other Swedes attacked both the pronoun and the book as harmful to family values and time-honored notions of binary gender.
The debate over Kivi suddenly made Swedes aware of hen, and despite initial resistance, hen slowly gained support. Hen appeared in one or two ads—to add a gentle comic touch—and in an occasional serious speech in Parliament, to make a point about gender inclusivity. At first the Språkrådet, the semi-official Swedish Language Council, condemned hen. Then the Council reversed itself, acknowledging hen as one of several ways to be gender-inclusive, along with neuter den. Other options included rewriting a sentence to make it plural; repeating the noun instead of using a pronoun; or using the phrase han eller hon, which no one really liked.
After 2012, hen began to pop up more frequently in newspapers and magazines and on television. In a 2015 episode of the Swedish/Danish show The Bridge, aired on British and American TV, a Danish detective, who has to have hen explained to her, teases her Swedish counterpart for being too politically correct. And in the 2017 Swedish series Rebecka Martinsson, a male detective just back from a gender-training course chides a superior because she did not refer to an unknown killer as hen.
Although relatively few people were using hen in conversation or in edited writing, in 2015 the Swedish Academy, whose eighteen members are best known for awarding Nobel prizes, added an entry for hen to the Academy’s Swedish Dictionary, the Svenska Akademiens Ordlista. Hen isn’t meant to replace the older, gendered pronouns; it’s simply a gender-free alternative. Today hen remains far from universal, and it’s still occasionally controversial. But on the plus side, hen is now familiar enough that newspapers or TV shows no longer have to explain hen when they use it.
But can hen cure sexism?
That’s the story of hen. Now for the real issues raised by Tavits and Pérez: Is hen making Swedes less sexist? And can ze or hir or singular they do the same for speakers of English?
Probably not. It’s true that sexist words reinforce sexist social patterns, and gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns may certainly condition us to think inclusively, as the PNAS study confirms. At least pronouns like hen can have that effect in the short term, under controlled experimental conditions. But language conditioning doesn’t prevent us from thinking outside established patterns, and it’s more likely that rejecting sexist stereotyping will prompt the use of inclusive pronouns than it is to expect a pronoun to revolutionize anyone’s behavior.
Even if the Swedish government tried to mandate hen, that would have little impact on popular usage. The French Academy’s failure to get French speakers to abandon English loan words is instructive here: authorities can recommend one word and ban another. The government can even fine you for using the wrong word, as Québec’s Office de la langue française does when businesses violate provincial laws protecting French. But it typically takes more than a dictionary or a statute to change a word habit.
It’s certainly true that after 2012 hen finally did gain widespread attention. A 2015 study showed that hen appeared nine times in one newspaper in the first half of 2012, and 113 times in that paper in the second half of the year. A dramatic increase, yes, but hardly a game changer compared to the thousands of times that paper used the conventional binaries han and hon. It’s safe to assume that hen occurs even more frequently today—but even if it’s destined to be a permanent feature of Swedish, it will take hen some time to achieve parity with the conventional pronouns.
Do the experiments performed by Tavits and Pérez suggest that exposing test subjects to gender-neutral words can condition them to be less sexist? Yes, but that conditioning may wear off without continued reinforcement. More important, when we look at Swedish, hen lay dormant for fifty years after its invention, and during that time—without a gender-neutral pronoun—Sweden made great strides toward gender parity and inclusivity.
As for English, the first coined gender-neutral pronoun, E, appeared in 1841. It was promptly forgotten, then reinvented multiple times, and forgotten multiple times as well. Gender-neutral ze pops up for the first time in 1864; hie in 1914; hir in 1920. Thon, coined in 1858, and heer, in 1912, found their way into major English dictionaries. Despite that recognition, they were never widely used. Over the past two centuries, more than 200 coined gender-neutral English pronouns launched and failed. During that same period, women entered professions and gained legal rights previously reserved for men, and more recently, the rights of LGBT people have expanded as well.
Certainly much remains to be done to end gender discrimination, and the fact that more English speakers are opting for gender-neutral and nonbinary English pronouns than ever before reflects the strengthening drive for inclusivity. Although questions like “What’s your pronoun?” are becoming common, and words like ze and hir don’t necessarily require explanation, the frequency of coined pronouns remains low in English compared with he and she and singular they.
As for mandating pronouns or making them official, words can signal whether someone is included or excluded, but real language isn’t bound by the controls that researchers can impose on their experiments. Unlike pronoun manipulation in the laboratory, natural pronoun change is more likely to reflect social change than it is to create it.
And so far as mandating pronouns, or any other word—well, have you ever tried to correct someone else’s language? Ask any parent or teacher or government official just how effective that has been.
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For the whole story on gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns, click to order your copy of my new book, What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond ‘he’ and ‘she.’
