This is International Women’s Day and in Sweden the movement is alive and well. One politician (a man) feels there should be legislation to make boys urinate sitting down rather than standing. It would make things simpler in the washroom and keep the place cleaner, he says. He also feels it would be healthier for the boys, to which we have no comment. Also fueling debate in Sweden these days, where gender equality is a national goal, is a new word in the dictionary. It is hen. Hen is a neutral pronoun that, again, makes everything equal. Some Swedes feel that neutrality initiatives are being exaggerated. Not everyone agrees with hen says school director Lotta Rajalin: “They think we are going to change girls to boys and boys to girls and that’s of course not what we are doing. We like to give every human being the same rights, the same possibilities, the same responsibilities. And that is a question of democracy.”
