Ella says that going to this school has changed how she sees her own sex – before she would never consider her gender to be like a scale.

Recently, mainstream pop culture entertained the idea of a neutral pronoun for referring to trans, gender queer and even some feminist folks who either don’t identify as “he” or “she” or are interested in demolishing that binary in speech. A flurry of completely new constructions has emerged to bridge the gap. On the microblogging platform and social networking site, Tumblr, it is now common for young people to pin their preferred pronouns to their pages: the writer behind a blog called “The Gayest Seabass” identifies as “Danny, xe/xim/xir or he/him/his or they/them/their, taken-ish, 20.”

Jill Soloway, creator of Amazon series “Transparent”, is a fan of “they as a corrective phenomenon. “A really interesting thought exercise is to say ‘they’ and ‘them’ for all genders,” she told the New Yorker recently. The promise of this revolution is not having to say, ‘Men do this, women do this.’ “

The media guide for “transgender issues” by Glaad, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group, advises reporters to use whatever pronoun their subjects prefer. If they don’t prefer “they”, using it anyway feels like an erasure of their own identity in favour of society’s new standardised label. In a very real way, accepting the fluidity of gender requires rejecting standards in general. It means opening our “closed class” of pronouns.

In Globala Gymnasiet they use the Swedish word “hen”, and Ella explained that no matter what the assignment is, gender roles and LGBT’s rights are always considered. Teachers and students co-operate to make everyone feel as welcome as possible, and they always use the word “hen” when describing both people and hypothetical situations.

Even in textbooks and math equations they use the word “hen”, because it describes everyone – those who feel like the gender they are, and those who do not.

THE WORD "HEN"