Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun
slate.com
slate.com
A country like... Finland perhaps?
The debate is ridiculous, a few people feel very strongly either way, but most people don't care at all, don't use the word, but won't get angry if someone else uses it. Whatever. It's a mountain out of a molehill.
(for the ignorant: these two are otherwise wildly different languages)
I believe Finnish is wildly different from just about every other language. Hindi and English are closerly related.
This is probably a sentence I will hear/see exactly once in my life; at least in a not-contrived manner. Thank you for that.
As someone pointed out, we have the gender-neutral pronoun "hän" in our language. I often wish English had an equivalent. It's very convenient sometimes.
Hän is fine, but most of the time we use the Finnish word for "it" instead. The word is "se" in Finnish, and it normally behaves exactly like the English equivalent - it's basically meant to be used for animals and objects.
Se is used because saying hän is too much work, or it would sound too formal when you're just talking with your friends etc.
Basically, we only use hän when we want to take care to sound respectful in some specific situation or when writing something that's not supposed to be casual.
At any rate, worrying about a gender-neutral pronoun making people confused about their sexual identities is just silly.
This quote particularly got to me:
> The Swedish Bowling Association has announced plans to merge male and female bowling tournaments in order to make the sport gender-neutral
In any physical contest men are highly likely to be the victors: there is a reason why the female marathon record is 10 minutes behind the male one, and it's not lack of training and effort. Maybe this doesn't apply to bowling so much, I don't know, but at the risk of committing the slippery-slope fallacy, I hope sports don't just jump on the gender-neutral bandwagon because it's politically advantageous/correct.
Morgan Freeman: I don't want a Black History Month. Black
history is American history.
Mike Wallace: How are we going to get rid of racism...?
Morgan Freeman: Stop talking about it. I'm going to stop
calling you a white man. And I'm going to ask you to stop
calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You
know me as Morgan Freeman.> One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys.
"gender-coded"? Is it because the boys said that only men/boys can drive/play with cars?
If the adults allowed girls equal access to play with the cars, they could, either explicitly or via the fact of girls playing with the cars, negate that notion.
> Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely "stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.
I wonder how these micro-managed and sheltered children will fare when they one day have to travel to or live in a different society where there is chauvinism, bullying, elbowing for hierarchy etc.
I think it's just a different kind of ignorance and it always reminds me of the saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"
Oh there's plenty of that in the Nordic Countries too. After all, we're not a different species over here.
That aside, the idea of a gender neutral pronoun sounds good to me. I'd also like a specifically plural "you", for example when you're talking to a representative of a company and want to refer to the company rather than the representative.
My mother in law tells the story that when her kids were small she was determined to raise them free of sexist gender norms. One of the things she did was get some dolls for her son and, for a few hours a day, she would hide his cars to make sure the dolls got equal time. This lasted until one day she looked into a room where he was playing with the doll by running it along the floor yelling "vroom vroom!" She brought out the cars and that was the end of that.
Some languages (including my native language) had always used gender-neutral pronouns, and it has never caused me (or anyone else that I know of) any problems. So I think the fear that it might destroy the language or cause mass-confusion is pointless.
[edit]
Aside from Persian, it seems[1] that Turkic, Filipino, Nahuatl, Malay, Indonesian, Georgian, Esperanto (which is not a natural language), Estonian, Armenian, Bengali, Nepali and probably tons of other languages have gender-neutral pronouns. None of them are as widely-used as Chinese, Spanish, English or Arabic though, and that's why many take gender-specific pronouns for granted...
'He', 'she' and 'it' in Chinese are pronounced the same. It's just in writing and from the context that the distinction is made clear. 她，他 and 它。tā, tā and tā.
In general, I think that people are focusing too much on words (actions matter), and that equallity is ok, but freedom shouldn't suffer because of that. Also, some people take equality too far - I have a penis, and if you have a vagina, we are different, phisically much more than any other human with a penis. There are some things we do different (I'm probably stronger and need to urinate less often. You can give birth and can better feed infants.). We might have different interests, and there's nothing wrong with that. We also get different roles in life; when you give birth, you're phisically damaged and the child needs you, so it's better if I go to work and earn money (if financially necesaary) (at least that's what a gentelman would do).
What exactly did the singular "they" mean? Same as "it", just for people?
The first European country to introduce women's suffrage was the Grand Duchy of Finland—then a part of the Russian Empire with autonomous powers—which also produced the world's first female members of parliament as a result of the 1907 parliamentary elections.
My country was the first in the world to introduce universal suffrage, in 1893. We speak English with its gender-specific pronouns.
>A country tries to banish gender.
And then I stopped reading. At least with printed news media you have the weight of the fact that what you write will be printed permanently on physical materials to perhaps keep you from producing taglines as embarrassingly juvenile as "A country tries to BANISH GENDER"
"The idea is that names should not be at all tied to gender, so it would be acceptable for parents to, say, name a girl Jack or a boy Lisa."
The funny thing is that this is the opposite of the idea; at the very least it's stated in a pretty uninformed way. This should read "The idea is that any name within reason would be acceptable for any human being that is born." The way the article puts it is subtly incredulous that a BOY would be named LISA??
How annoying, male and female clothing not being labeled? Uhh the proportions are different folks, are they going to ban bras? or make men start wearing them just to be fair? Are they going to stop offering dresses and slacks and replace them with some hybrid piece of clothing? How about letting men in women's locker rooms and men participate in women's pro sports. How about forcing men to take sedatives so the women can compete on a level playing field athletically.
Some science fiction books/movies come to mind when I thing of where Sweden is headed in the next 5-10 years (Demolition man in neuter/hen land).
I'll bet some band of 1000 Al Queda militants goes in there, obliterates the hen military and takes over the entire country within a 24 hour period. They won't even object because they are so PC and will be so distracted with "being astonished".
The men over there aren't even men anymore (at least not inside) and the women some hybrid of man and women.
That's progress I guess...