Johnson | Gender

Swedish hens and singular "they"

Efforts to eliminate "he" and "she" in Swedish are probably doomed

By R.L.G. | NEW YORK

SLATE's Nathalie Rothschild wrote last week about gender in Sweden. Among Swedish efforts to minimise gender stereotyping is a small movement to replace the pronouns han and hon, "he" and "she", with a single pronoun, hen.

This is not unique to Sweden. Such pronouns have been proposed for English, too. And last year my colleague wrote about vas a pronoun for transgender people.

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