The first language I was taught in school was French.

Unfortunately, the school I

was going to was horrible, so I didn’t have the slightest understanding or even awareness
about “masculine” and “feminine” words. I first became aware of the existence of gender
in language when I moved to the school where I learned Spanish and Latin, both
gendered.
I remember my first reaction: “Why?” That’s still my reaction. Why is it
necessary for concepts to have gender? Especially when it’s so nonsensical – why is
“dress” (“vestido”) masculine? (If I was a generous person I’d applaud Spanish for
promoting gender-representation noncomformity, but it’s way more likely that it’s just an
evolution of “dress” as in clothes, or “to dress”. I am not a generous person.) Why do
some words have gender if some words are neuter – why is a house feminine but a
bedroom apparently has no gender? (Random side note: That was one of my first
thoughts after the Latin explanation of gender, once I got past everyone giggling at
“neuter”. I’ll fess up – I almost asked “Where’s the spay case?” Almost.)
I will write more about the nonexistent necessity for gender in language in a
separate article – right now, I want to talk about languages without it.
And I don’t just mean languages where a word need not be
masculine/feminine/neuter, it’s just a word – I’m talking about languages where the
recognition of gender, or even sex itself does not exist in pronouns.
Finnish was the first degendered - not a real word, just think it describes this well
– language I was exposed to, and it was quite a relief to not have to worry about what
ending my “potato” takes. But I was rather confused when I encountered the vocabulary
list entry for the word “hän” –

hän – he, she

In what was probably one of my greater moments of naïveté, I actually leaned

over and asked my teacher “Which one is it?”
Looking back on it, my astonishment upon learning it was “both” was hilarious. I
kept thinking – “Well, how do you tell if it’s talking about a man or woman?”
Now, let me make it straight: This doesn’t mean “it”. There is a word for “it” –
“se” – but that is, like in English, used to refer to inanimate objects without any sex
whatsoever. And it’s not just a more politically correct term to use in addition to separate
words for “he” and “she”.
I went on in that mindset for a while, until I realized – that’s genius. It solves
effortlessly the problem we have of the constant need to say “he/she” or “his/her” as not
to be sexist. It allows you to talk about those whose gender you don’t know without being
offensive. It frees gender-neutral, transgender, and other non-binary people from the false
dichotomy of “male” and “female”. It’s genius.
(Though, this is not to say I haven’t been frustrated after having to re-do a whole
translation…but no language is perfect. It’s also worth noting that “he”, which means
“they” is also gender-neutral…but so is it in English, so it’s not remarkable. )
But wait, there’s more. I mentioned that “se” was the equivalent of our “it”…but
only in formal Finnish. In everyday life, “se” is often used in place of “hän”. So, not only
is Finnish gender-neutral, it’s becoming species-neutral.
 Hungarian takes the same step, only it’s officially recognized and used in formal
situations: “Ő” means “he”, “she”, and “it”.
Estonian too: “Tema” for “he/she”. In fact, all Uralic languages use only gender-
neutral pronouns. I mean it when I say: Awesome.
There are other languages, and whole language families, that follow the same
degendered pronoun pattern, but these are the first three I became acquainted with, and I
love them. Maybe English should take the hint.