Sweden Moves Towards Gender Neutrality [Support Thread]

[Lieju]

You people have no idea how lucky you are to have masculine and feminine pronouns. They make explaining certain situations so much more convenient.

But on the other hand, if you don't know the gender of the person, it becomes more difficult...

It would be easiest if you had pronouns for referring to different kinds of people, I suppose, for ones you know the gender of, the ones you don't, the ones who are older than you, younger, people you don't like etc.

Why stop at gender?

In school I was told that girls just aren't good at math, and other kids spread rumours that I was cheating because I got good grades in math.

Which decade are we talking about here? Because I saw none of this shit in the nineties.

Also, as a kid my favorite color was red, and my best friend was a girl whose favorite color was blue. When we played house, she was the dad. Because fuck gender roles. She did suck at math though.

I grew up on the nineties.
The attitudes towards gender-roles felt like it was from the 50's, though.
I mean, we were told to dress 'properly' for the Independence day celebrations in junior high/high school, and for girls this meant dresses, of course.

Luckily I had a mother who was okay with me being me. Despite trying to get me to use make-up and dresses, but she gave up pretty easily. I never did forgive her for making me wear a dress to school, though, and didn't budge when it came to my graduation and confirmation.

 

[Helmholtz Watson]

Given how previous topics such as this one have devolved into flame wars and required moderator lockdown, apparently the community needs to be reminded of the board rules in bright blue text. I wouldn't go through all this trouble if it wasn't necessary.

Its the nature of the beast, people like to argue with one another, they like conflict. To give you an example of what I'm talking about, take a look at this video where Nicholas Cage plays a screenwriter and proposes the idea that a story be written where there is no conflict so that it can reflect "real life"(swearing is involved, just fyi)....


In other words, generally speaking people like conflict and if this forum was nothing but reaffirming opinions, it would be nothing but an echo chamber.

How...? Where...? How did you derive that conclusion? Where are you getting that information from? Sweden has done something that affects only its country and that other countries are free to imitate if they agree with it (which I hope they do). No idea where you're getting that they're forcing other cultures into conforming.

I was referring to your earlier comment in which you stated that...

"It is my sincerest hope that this ushers a new wave of change and progress in the world"

...which to me, came off as if you wish that others were forced to adopt this idea as well. Hence my comment about how I don't care much for some neo-European cultural imperialism. If Sweden wants to do this, fine. However, don't expect the rest of the world to conform to this mentality unless you plan on "pressuring" them to bastardize their language.

 

[distortedreality]

*snip*

Wow, that was way more elaborate than what we did. We just beat the crap out of each other and shouted angrily until our voices got hoarse.

But yeah, it really doesn't matter what toy is overvalued, there's always a fad that sweeps through the playground and causes strife like that.

I don't know, I can probably yell for a while yet

Thanks to BFT for the info, I couldn't be arsed translating the article lol.

It still doesn't really change anything from my POV though - I was having a discussion at uni the other day (funnily enough, talk around the edges of gender in education) - and my opinion was that a school can't positively reinforce gender values, they can only negatively reinforce them, my point being that the majority of a a childs gender identity (especially at the young age we're talking about here) is made up from what they experience in the home.

Bringing that thought back to the article, wouldn't it be more appropriate to educate parents of gender neutrality instead of what that school is doing? It seems sort of defeatist that the system feels that kids feel safer in a school environment than they would in a home environment. The way they're doing it just feels like a big experiment to me - and that's not cool imo. I just think there has to be a better way to do this.

 

[Aramis Night]

But where does this leave a boy who wants to play with boy toys and has no interest in girl's/gender neutral toys? From what i've seen this tends to make kids want what they want even more. Kid's tend to be reactionary. However they are not without preferences. If children choose to value boy toys over female/gender neutral toys, then it doesn't seem that there is any reason to not allow the girls to play with them as well if they choose rather than limiting the toys that a boy can choose to play with. This would also negatively affect the ability of girls to also choose to play with whatever toy they wish.

I know my gf would definitely have taken issue with that. She used to prefer boy toys(i can't seem to make that come out right). She is the greatest example of a woman i know. It didn't make her into something else or cause any developmental problems. I despised girl toys and found most gender neutral toys to be bland. They just weren't interesting (except for maybe those ovens). I was all about transformers and other toy robots. Oh and video games. Well still with the video games. Spent most of today in another closed beta for an upcoming game. Yeah... toys.

My parents tried to keep me away from video games. They actually banned me from ever being in anyone's house if they knew that there was a video game system there. And they always would check. They would beat me for being in a place with an arcade. It never stopped me. And this was back in the NES days. I got beaten a lot over this. And not soft beatings like parents are afraid to give their kids now. I'm talking wooden paddles with holes in them. Being beaten in the shower with a wet leather belt. Being whipped with the buckle side of the belt. And not just a couple hits. On average about 10-20 hits at a time. Didn't deter me in the slightest. How far are these social engineers in sweden willing to go? This won't change anything.

I agree with you that it won't change kids' preferences. And I'd said I didn't think removing the toys was the best way to deal with the problem. But the problem is that boys have very little social freedom to interact with "girl" things, while girls do have some degree of social freedom to interact with "boy" things.

So I don't think saying "Fuck your cars, play with dolls" is going to fix anything, and indeed likely would make things worse. (I can imagine even in this preschool, there's enormous social pressure for boys to publicly denigrate the "girl" toys if that's all they're allowed access to.) But it's not about forcing boys to like "girl" things or prevent girls who like "boy" things from playing with them. It's about giving access to "girl" things for boys who do like them and creating a safe space for boys to play with them to play with them without fear of parental disapproval or ostracization by/from peer groups. Again, I don't think it's the right course of action and I don't think it will be effective in achieving its goals, but I do think something else should be done to try and improve the situation.

The problem i have with so much of this is that it seems to assume that much of what determines male/female preference is based on social influences rather than biology. At some when the gender binary was being established for what would evolve to become us, there had to have been a point where we were blank slate's without social conditioning. And yet we evolved along the lines we did. Why? Because biology guided the social conditioning, not the other way around.

No one wants to acknowledge it because it violates our very idea of personal free will, but hormones alone can radically change us. Our brains are radically altered to process information differently merely because we were dowsed with either large amounts of estrogen or testosterone while in utero. Science is still studying these complexities. I was actually pretty impressed when they tackled this in a later episode of House M.D. But much like the character they used to illustrate the scenario in the show, we each have a choice about whether we should indulge our natures or not. However it has to be an individual's choice. You can't make that choice for anyone else, and neither can a government.

 

[excalipoor]

But on the other hand, if you don't know the gender of the person, it becomes more difficult...

It would be easiest if you had pronouns for referring to different kinds of people, I suppose, for ones you know the gender of, the ones you don't, the ones who are older than you, younger, people you don't like etc.

Why stop at gender?

I'm not saying Finnish should attempt to implement genders into itself, I just find myself forming completely illegible phrases when I'm trying to explain something fast. In spoken Finnish, even 'it' and 's/he' are often the same.

"Se sano sil sitä ja sitä ja se sano et nii ja se vastas et näi ja se teki sit sillee, ja se otti sit sen ja se ei ollu sen semmosempi se."

Try to make sense of that, I dare you.

I grew up on the nineties.
The attitudes towards gender-roles felt like it was from the 50's, though.
I mean, we were told to dress 'properly' for the Independence day celebrations in junior high/high school, and for girls this meant dresses, of course.

Luckily I had a mother who was okay with me being me. Despite trying to get me to use make-up and dresses, but she gave up pretty easily. I never did forgive her for making me wear a dress to school, though, and didn't budge when it came to my graduation and confirmation.

Huh. Well, all I can say is that I never saw anyone forced to wear a dress. The only dresscode we ever had was that boys definitely, absolutely take their fucking hats off during ceremonies. In elementary school I don't remember "properly" ever being described as anything more than "neat and clean". In high school we had plenty of girls wearing suits and ties for the fancier occasions, because why not.

Right now I have a 15yrs old little sister who very much does her own thing, and I don't see or hear anyone trying to tell her to do otherwise. Except for our granny, who'd love for her to dress "nicer". We don't pay much attention to her. And while my sister dresses like a slob, she's also a straight-A student. Math included!

I've tried to stay away from these gender discussions, partly because most of these discussions are centered on the Anglosphere, but mostly because as someone living in southern Finland, they seem totally absurd to me. I can't speak for the rest of the world, and I don't know where around Finland you're from, but in my daily life I just don't see the kind of active oppression going on as is described in so many of these threads. I just don't.

 

[MetalMagpie]

Well, it's certainly better than the confusing English practice of using "they" as a gender neutral pronoun for a single person.

 

[Arfonious]

As a Swedish man I find this whole thing quite silly.

I am however ok with the gender neutral pronound, it's only sad that they choose such a feminine sounding word for it.

 

[Dr. Cakey]

So wait... currently Sweden didn't have any words like "they", "them", or "that person"? Odd, but as an English speaker I guess I support them making their language convenient for people to communicate with one another.

I suppose I should be glad people think "they" is a single pronoun, because I've been trying to make it one for several years now. Nonetheless, your English teacher will bitchslap you if use it that way, and so will any companies you might want to hire you. Also, and perhaps more importantly, while "they" and "their" sound pretty natural when used as singulars, "them" doesn't sound right.

Which leaves us with "it". Except "it" isn't gender-neutral, it's neuter. It's for things without a gender or, more poetically, things without a soul, since you can call an animal "it". There's also a secondary problem that there's no difference between the subject, object, and possessive forms, which gets monumentally clunky when used in succession. For example, if I'm talking about a hyperintelligent shade of the color blue, which has no gender, then I'm going to end up with painful constructions like "It stroked its chin while examining the map I gave it", whereas if I were to use a different pronoun, the result would be "He stroked his chin while examining the map I gave him", which has the upshot of not sounding retarded.

Then there's "one" I guess, but it sounds awful. More importantly, it only works in certain kinds of sentences. For example, I can't say "One picked up one's suitcase". I'll take the confusion of "they" over a word that can't be used in most sentences.

All that's left is "he", which I think is semi-gender-neutral as a holdover from Romance languages like Spanish, where the masculine pronouns and forms are also the gender-neutral/mixed gender ones. You can also alternate 'he' and 'she', but that only works in the very specific case where the speaker is addressing a vast, unseen audience. In other words, it has no use outside of instruction manuals and self-help books.

As a writer, English needs a gender-neutral pronoun.

 

[Daggedawg]

As a Swede living in Japan, I can only giggle at this "weird" new word.

 

[IamQ]

Gender neutral words and toys!? Wha-... why?

When did it happen that being called 'he' or 'she' is suddenly not done?

Looks like worldpeace can only be achieved by forcing everyone to be the same. No distinction, no flavor, just a saltless grey society.

Being a Swede, my take on the word is that it's purpose is more to be used when the gender isn't assigned yet. Like if you have a suspect, but no identity, or if you're just talking about people in general.

In that case couldn't we just use the discription we've always been using, like "the suspect", "the doctor", "the teacher"? I'm still not seeing the point to a gender neutral discription, other than people being offended that you didn't refer to them as gender neutral.

Well, when we don't know the gender, we often say "den" which translates to "it" which we mostly use to describle objects. We rarely, if ever, refer to peoples occupations. So I think "hen" helps distinguish instantly that it is a person of unknown gender. And if you don't like it, you don't have to use it. The people calling this some kind of big travesty, saying that it destroys genders, are just over exaggerating.

 

[Harrowdown]

Anyway, I don't think this whole neutral pronoun think is likely to fuck anything up. Not seriously, anyway. A lot of people were aggressively against the introduction of 'Ms.' as a title for women (not that you're coming across as aggressive or anything), but the result of that little experiment was fairly positive, if not monumental.

curious because i don't know, what did they use before that caused so much distraught over "Ms." ?

Before people started using Ms., women were referred to either with the honorific 'Miss' or 'Mrs', depending on marital status. The point of Ms. was to create an honorific for women that didn't define them according to their relationship to men.

 

[INeedAName]

As a Swede, I can say that the word "hen" is definitely not a new thing and, personally, I think the word is rather silly. It sounds childish to my ears. Maybe that's because I was a child the first time I heard it (and I've yet to actually meet more than /one/ person who uses it semi-regularly) and thus associate it with childhood? In any case, it all feels very artificial to me. Whenever I talk about a person I absolutely don't know or don't want to reveal the gender of, I say "han eller hon" ("he or she") or "personen i fråga" (the person in question) or whatever. I've never really heard someone use the word "hen" in a day-to-day conversation, and I've never used it unironically.

Still, I suppose that if the government feels it absolutely needs a gender-neutral word (or if someone actually decides to use it), I don't mind.

 

[Lieju]

I grew up on the nineties.
The attitudes towards gender-roles felt like it was from the 50's, though.
I mean, we were told to dress 'properly' for the Independence day celebrations in junior high/high school, and for girls this meant dresses, of course.

Luckily I had a mother who was okay with me being me. Despite trying to get me to use make-up and dresses, but she gave up pretty easily. I never did forgive her for making me wear a dress to school, though, and didn't budge when it came to my graduation and confirmation.

Huh. Well, all I can say is that I never saw anyone forced to wear a dress. The only dresscode we ever had was that boys definitely, absolutely take their fucking hats off during ceremonies. In elementary school I don't remember "properly" ever being described as anything more than "neat and clean". In high school we had plenty of girls wearing suits and ties for the fancier occasions, because why not.

Right now I have a 15yrs old little sister who very much does her own thing, and I don't see or hear anyone trying to tell her to do otherwise. Except for our granny, who'd love for her to dress "nicer". We don't pay much attention to her. And while my sister dresses like a slob, she's also a straight-A student. Math included!

I've tried to stay away from these gender discussions, partly because most of these discussions are centered on the Anglosphere, but mostly because as someone living in southern Finland, they seem totally absurd to me. I can't speak for the rest of the world, and I don't know where around Finland you're from, but in my daily life I just don't see the kind of active oppression going on as is described in so many of these threads. I just don't.

It depends on where you live, even within a country. I grew up on a countryside, and if you go to places with strong religious influences it can be even worse.

Don't you think, that if you're lucky enough to live in a place without this kind of BS going on, you'd have a valuable point of view to offer in these kinds of discussion?

As in, 'We let my little sister dress like she wants to and the world did not explode'?

 

[Angie7F]

I speak Japanese and we dont have gender for nouns so i never understood why it was necessary.
However i also know that not having gender doesnt mean mean gender equality, so i hope all this fuss does not end up in vain...

 

[Spoonius]

Swede here, and I don't approve of something as silly as "Hen". Equality and deconstructivism isn't the same thing. We should strive for equality of rights, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make distinctions between the two. Men and women aren't the same, and that's a bloody good thing.

My thoughts exactly. Rights are rights, and should be equal for everybody regardless of gender, race, etc. However perceived equality should not extend to everything. Before anyone accuses me of being a bigot, racist, sexist, homophobe, etc... I'm not.

Despite what fanatical egalitarians (like many in this thread) may think, men and women are fundamentally different and that difference affects almost every aspect of our lives. As it's supposed to. Each gender is highly specialised (both physiologically and psychologically) to fulfil certain social/biological roles and tasks. I don't care what people say, this is a scientific fact and can't rationally be disputed.

If we go down this road and begin interfering with these fundamental specialisations... then where does it end? Today we're preventing the next generation from playing with cars and dolls, tomorrow we're inhibiting their hormones during puberty, what if the day after that they're forced to conform to hermaphroditic physiologies and heterosexuals who identify as men or women are the deviants?

The genders complement one another. Yin and yang. A mutually-beneficial relationship that has withstood the test of time. To standardise us would be to weaken us as a species, and anybody suggesting it is in all honesty more than a little misguided. You don't fix what isn't broken just because you can.

 

[Aramis Night]

Swede here, and I don't approve of something as silly as "Hen". Equality and deconstructivism isn't the same thing. We should strive for equality of rights, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make distinctions between the two. Men and women aren't the same, and that's a bloody good thing.

My thoughts exactly. Rights are rights, and should be equal for everybody regardless of gender, race, etc. However perceived equality should not extend to everything. Before anyone accuses me of being a bigot, racist, sexist, homophobe, etc... I'm not.

Despite what fanatical egalitarians (like many in this thread) may think, men and women are fundamentally different and that difference affects almost every aspect of our lives. As it's supposed to. Each gender is highly specialised (both physiologically and psychologically) to fulfil certain social/biological roles and tasks. I don't care what people say, this is a scientific fact and can't rationally be disputed.

If we go down this road and begin interfering with these fundamental specialisations... then where does it end? Today we're preventing the next generation from playing with cars and dolls, tomorrow we're inhibiting their hormones during puberty, what if the day after that they're forced to conform to hermaphroditic physiologies and heterosexuals who identify as men or women are the deviants?

The genders complement one another. Yin and yang. A mutually-beneficial relationship that has withstood the test of time. To standardise us would be to weaken us as a species, and anybody suggesting it is in all honesty more than a little misguided. You don't fix what isn't broken just because you can.

I agree with most of what your saying but i feel i need to correct one misinterpretation you have of the debate here. The egalitarians are not the ones taking the position you claim. We have pretty much all been taking the stance here that gender is usually based on biology. The idea that gender is a social construct is a feminist theory. One that i disagree with and find incredibly damaging as most egalitarians do. We do not believe that one gender is compelled to take advantage of the other simply because of what the genders themselves are, therefore we don't feel the need to change the way genders are perceived. Egalitarians simply believe in equal rights without having to make up some crazy justifications for it outside of it simply being the right and fair thing to do.

 

[RionP]

As a Dane watching Sweden from the outside, it's more and more turning into a Bizzaro version of the US, with extreme rightwing christian capitalism replaced by political correctness and hippies. It's already reached the point where the fact that a major library censored Tintin in the Congo [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Congo] because it was written in 1931 and they didn't want people to even be exposed to the fact that racism exists/has existed. Sure there was an outcry that censorship is the tool of fascism, but to an outside view it didn't seem likelike was with the fact information were being withheld, but how heavyhanded it was.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Anyway, I don't think this whole neutral pronoun think is likely to fuck anything up. Not seriously, anyway. A lot of people were aggressively against the introduction of 'Ms.' as a title for women (not that you're coming across as aggressive or anything), but the result of that little experiment was fairly positive, if not monumental.

curious because i don't know, what did they use before that caused so much distraught over "Ms." ?

Before people started using Ms., women were referred to either with the honorific 'Miss' or 'Mrs', depending on marital status. The point of Ms. was to create an honorific for women that didn't define them according to their relationship to men.

ohhhh gotcha, i guess i forgot that.

i honestly haven't seen many, if any, women use the "miss" title in that definition, they usually change/don't change their last name for that part, but switch to the mrs. regardless.

(i'd honestly be okay if men had some different form of Mr. to signify marriage too, it's stupid there isn't one but there is for women.)