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 v as a pronoun for transgender people. 

On Friday, Geoff Pullum was sceptical about both pillars of the Swedish enterprise:

I don't know which I would say is likely to be more difficult: eliminating gender stereotypes and inequalities from society or getting a neologism established by fiat in the set of pronouns in a language. 

A few parts of speech admit new members readily: verbs and nouns and adjectives are successfully coined all time. But the bits of grammatical plumbing like conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns don't admit much innovation. (A bit, but not much.)  And what they really don't admit is top-down imposition. 

Mr Pullum notes an irony:

our pronoun they was originally borrowed into English from the Scandinavian language family (the Danish spoken by the invaders of northern England about a thousand years ago) and since then has been doing useful service in English as the morphosyntactically plural but singular-antecedent-permitting gender-neutral pronoun known to linguists as singular they.

Yes, singular they has been used for quite a long time in impeccable English sources. It has three gender-neutral uses,when the gender of an antecedent is 

plural and mixed:  Everyone has their own opinion

unknown: Someone left their book here.

unimportant: Anyone who works here should know they'll have to work hard

Traditional usage proscribes "his" in these situations. But it rubs modern sensibilities raw. Would you advise a new female trainee with "Anyone who works here should know he'll have to work hard"?  The other options all have downsides, too. Most people agree that "he or she" is ugly, especially when repeated. Some writers simply rotate "he" and "she".  But many point out that English has already solved this problem. It's odd, but not mind-blowingly so, that they, though "morphosyntactically" plural as Mr Pullum puts it technically, fills in when gender is mixed, uknown or unimportant.  Singular they is used by almost everyone in casual speech, despite centuries of attempts to ban it. 

But what's new in Sweden is not analogous to they.  Hen was originally intended to behave like singular they, when gender was unknown. But a children's-book author has recently adopted the radical feminist position of using it to replace han and hon entirely.  This would be a little bit like saying

Steve left their jacket here. They're going to really be cold outside without it

Mary is getting bored in their marriage and is considering leaving their husband

Mr Pullum has actually understated how hard entrenching this use of hen would be.  "Getting a neologism established by fiat in the set of pronouns" would be quite a feat. Eliminating two ancient pronouns in the service of a social-political agenda would be far harder still. Feminism is deeply mainstream in Sweden. But if we could check back in a hundred years' time, I'd take even money today that han and hon will be in service.

Addendum: Based on the Slate article, I posted too soon without poking around a bit. Jesper Lundqvist, the children's author mentioned above, was interviewed about his use of hen in his children's book. He doesn't want to replace han and hon but simply to add hen. A quick translation:

And he has seen himself how kids react to his book. "When I read the book to older children who can repeat the story, then the boys call Kivi "him" and the girls called Kivi "her", says Jesper Lundqvist.

Do you use the word [hen] yourself on a daily basis?

- Yes, more and more. I hadn't done it before I wrote the book; it was an experiment. When I thought about it a bit it adds something in a certain context. If someone was at the doctor's, for example, and tells about it and says "he" or "she" for the doctor, it paints a certain picture. It's interesting what it does to the picture when someone calls the doctor "hen". 

But Jesper Lundqvist points out that the use of "hen" won't automatically lead to equality in the world. Moreover, he thinks that some people have misunderstood the debate.

- Certain people think that it's about removing "hon" and "han", but it's not. It's more about having an extra tool in the toolbox and being able to choose. 

I'm afraid Slate, as is too often the case, overplayed the story in the subheadline "A country tries to banish gender."  "A few radicals try to banish gender while the rest of the country grapples with it in new ways" would have been the more boring, but accurate, headline.