From the top of Teletorn, the Estonian Television Tower, you can see Finland, just 80 km (50 miles) away. The water stretching between the two countries is dotted with islands where you can imagine hiding from the world and becoming the person you were always meant to be. Living in Tallinn, Estonia and doing stand-up comedy, I spent a lot of time island-gazing.

Across the Baltic Sea, just a bit out of view from the Teletorn, is the Finnish archipelago of Raasepori. An easy ferry ride from Helsinki’s downtown, the islands seem to belong to another time. Thousands of seabirds nest in the old-growth forest, maintained by Finland’s National Forest Service. The area’s rich history includes mining and Sammallahdenmäki, the first prehistoric archaeological site in Finland, with burial cairns from the Western Bronze Age culture in Finland.

Raasepori is a popular tourist destination, offering picturesque wooden villages and hiking, cycling and beaches. The appeal seems obvious. So when U.S. entrepreneur Kristina Roth, founder of Matisia Consultants, a consulting company on the 2015 list of 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned Companies Worldwide, learned from her Finnish fiance that one of the Raasepori islands was for sale in 2017, she bought it. And she planned to fill it with women.

Roth’s vision when she bought the island was to create a permanent home for the SuperShe Society, a project she started several years before. It began as a networking group and eventually included a lifestyle blog, events, and women-only retreats in luxurious locations like Bali. Roth was “bored out of her mind” by traditional women’s networking events and envisioned bringing together independent women for experiences that organically united them. Seeking an escape from a world filled with “tech bros,” Roth saw a chance to curate the peer group she’d always wished she had. Across the water in Tallinn, as I listened to men tell me after my comedy sets that they never thought women were funny but they guessed maybe I was okay, I could sympathize. But I found that the sort of community Roth wanted to build was only available for some.

Finland has a strong feminist history: women gained the right to vote in 1906 and the 1995 Equality Act mandated a minimum of 40% of both sexes in all publically nominated bodies, which doubled the number of women serving in these positions virtually overnight. Businesses with more than 30 employees are required to have an equality plan and to implement measures to promote equality.

I found that the sort of community Roth wanted to build was only available for some.
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Equality is so prized in Finland, in fact, that Roth’s SuperShe island plan generated an investigation on the grounds of discrimination, with the Finnish Non-discrimination Ombudsman Jukka Maarianvara ultimately ruling on the 4th of June, 2018 that the island resort’s policy of serving only women was legal, and opening the way for the resort to accept visitors as scheduled. The notorious Finnish bureaucracy also challenged Roth, who complained that “[her] experience as an outsider and investor in this beautiful country led me to reconsider future plans,” as “[she’d] wasted millions of euros on [Finland]. [She] had planned to make future investments in the Finnish archipelago and Lapland, but at this rate it’s not happening,”

Roth persevered, and according to the tourism manager of Raasepori, Ville Vuorelma, in an email to me on July 4, 2018, they “are really glad that [Roth] has found the unique Finnish archipelago. The Island opened on the midsummer weekend [June 23-24] and I’ve understood it’s fully booked for a quite some time, so it’s probably difficult to organize a visit there at the moment.”

Beyond simply being a woman (which includes anyone identifying as a woman, according to interviews with Roth, a policy that doesn’t specifically address those identifying as non-binary), Roth has a vetting process for those who would like to visit, and she hand-selects each visitor. “The number one, number one thing that’s important for me is that you have an amazing personality — like upbeat, cool personality — because you’re on [an] island… That’s what’s going to make it fun and exciting for everyone.” For someone who was bored in the uniculture of the bro-tech world, this is an interesting stance to take. Research shows that selecting candidates by perceived “fit” typically results in selection of those who are like the selector; by the report of one recent Super She, those visiting the island are varying degrees of successful, blonde and thin. Is that really the sole way an amazing personality manifests, and does it really sound fun and exciting?

Would-be SuperShes are invited to apply for membership through the website, with Roth personally reviewing each application. With an eye to seeing whether my own coolness credentials measured up, I applied for membership on March 14, 2018, and had my application approved April 2, 2018. In my application, I wrote that I was a stand-up comedian in the United States and Estonia and that I enjoyed making jokes for and with women and for that reason, a visit to the island would be restorative for me, all true.

However, a dazzling application didn’t mean I had immediate access to the island. Though Roth originally claimed that one-day trips to the island would be available for local visitors, as the opening date approached, no single-day options materialized. One-week reservations, at a cost of 4,000 euros ($4,669), proved prohibitive for visiting. From Estonia, with an average Estonian salary of 1,242 euros a month, a little jaunt to SuperShe would consume a quarter of the year’s wages.

By the report of one recent Super She, those visiting the island are varying degrees of successful, blonde and thin. Is that really the sole way an amazing personality manifests?
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They didn’t give up on me. On June 30, I received an email with an offer to take the last spot on a week-long retreat, saying it was “something wild” I could gift to myself. But alas, my budget could not accommodate the offer.

There is no question that putting money towards gender empowerment, including women’s networking groups, makes lives better for everyone. Women in male-dominated industries, like the “tech bros” Roth worked with, can be exhausted. (I should know: female comedians make up approximately 14.3% of performers and burnout is rampant.) We could all use some time on a private island, away from those who distract us or detract from us. It would be even better if there were interesting professionals there, with time to exchange ideas. But guess who can benefit most from mixing with powerful or connected women in leading fields?

Poor women.

Mentoring and being connected helps women get ahead, but most often it helps already privileged and connected women find more success. Arianna Huffington, for example, spoke at the Thrive conference in 2014, saying, “I have a group of women friends that I hike with,” Huffington told the crowd. “They were the first people I talked to about my dream of launching a blog called the Huffington Post, and one of them became my first investor.” (Huffington’s hiking buddy was environmentalist and multimillionaire Laurie David.) Women clearly yearn for this type of connection, if the 7,000 applications for SuperShe membership prove anything. But without any accommodations in place for those unable to pay 4,000 euros, this “women’s paradise” isn’t an exercise in feminist bonding. It’s a country club. Even Roth gets sick of it: most nights Roth heads to [her boyfriend’s neighboring island] for the night, returning before the SuperShes awake.

Opening a private island for you and your besties to party on is hardly a new concept; it’s only adding “no boys allowed” and calling it feminist that makes it remotely newsworthy. Positioning this as a step forward with “something to offer every woman” is borderline delusional.      

I don’t have any millionaire hiking buddies to invest in me or my comedy, unfortunately, and since the SuperShe retreat is out of my reach, it looks like I won’t be getting any soon. There are places to go in Finland for that woman-only support, though. I was lucky enough to experience it myself in March of 2016, when I attended Salin Comics Camp at Villa Salin. The Feminist Association Unioni manages the Summer House of Ida Salin, a villa once owned by a button manufacturer, and allows groups with a feminist bent to use the building for residencies and workshops. It’s not on an island, but there is a beach and of course, you can see lots of islands.

I wrote several of my favorite jokes at Feminist Comic Camp, and met women from across Sweden, Finland, and Estonia. I felt that special sense of comradery and that unintentional exhale of relief that comes from a situation where you feel kinship with everyone there, just as Roth envisioned.

Since the Comics Camp residency was free, including all meals, though, I was able to save for additional opportunities and staying in touch with the women with whom I connected. Roth is 100% correct when she says that spaces for women to connect are both needed and rare. It is simply a shame that they are out of reach for so many, and that’s no joke.

Over the last few years, we’ve progressed significantly in our acceptance of gender fluidity: One seminal 2015 poll found that half of millennials in the United States believe gender isn’t limited to male and female, a meaningful change from previous generations. Today, Facebook offers a custom field for people to express their gender identity, and Tinder and OkCupid have expanded gender options that people can select before swiping left or sending a DM.

Wrapped up in this revolution is an understanding that conventional gender pronouns are extremely limited. But what if you spoke a language that didn’t even have separate words for “him” or “her”? Or what if just about every noun in your world was masculine or feminine — seemingly at random? What impact would this have?

Inside Planned Parenthood’s Push For Gender-Neutral Language
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It turns out, the way language is constructed can have a significant impact on the way people think and interact with the world. One rather chilling study, for instance, found that people who read in gendered languages responded with higher levels of sexism to a questionnaire they took after the study.

For those who don’t identify along the gender binary, these distinctions also matter. To find out how and why, I spoke with people from several countries who have come out as genderqueer, nonbinary, or gender-questioning. Their insights reveal the crucial, and often overlooked, importance of one’s native language in the expression of gender identity.

Before diving in to the intersection of language and gender identity, it’s important to understand some details. Broadly speaking, there are three ways gender can be incorporated into language:

*Natural gender languages, including English and Swedish, don’t typically categorize non-human, non-animal nouns into male or female categories. A table and tree are it, while people are he or she.

*In gendered languages like Spanish, German, and French, both people and objects are given a gender. A table, for instance, is a feminine noun in French — “She is a lovely table!” — while a tree is a masculine noun in German. “I planted him in the forest, where he will grow very tall!”

*Chinese, Estonian, and Finnish are examples of genderless languages, which don’t categorize any nouns as feminine or masculine, and use the same word for he or she in regards to humans.

Half of millennials in the United States believe gender isn’t limited to male and female.
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“Natural gender” languages like English perpetuate the idea of a strict gender binary for humans. But there is one option to challenge these parameters: the use of gender-neutral terms. In English, these terms include they as a singular, ze/zir or zie/zir, ze/hir or other variations, and Mx. in written forms.

These terms are undoubtedly beneficial, helping to allow for expression across the gender spectrum. But are they enough?

In a 2016 survey — Bucking the Linguistic Binary — 20% of monolingual, transgender English speakers said, “yes, English gender-neutral language allows me to express my identity”; 31% said “no, it does not allow for adequate identity expression”; and 19% said “yes and no.” About 4% specified that they felt that it currently did not allow them to express their identities, but, “the situation was improving and that they were hopeful that time and advocacy would lead to increased acceptance of the language that would allow them to express their identities.”

Those who answered “yes and no” detailed both positive and negative aspects. One participant wrote:

“When I was using gender-neutral pronouns in English, it was almost impossible to get anyone who wasn’t in the queer community to use ‘they’ for me consistently. This was at an early stage of me asking them not to use ‘she’ (the pronoun I was ‘assigned’ at birth), so I think people were still getting used to the idea of any pronoun other than ‘she’ for me. But I had the impression that people outside the queer world (not LGBT but ‘queer’ as in challenging gender binaries) had an even harder time with the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun than with the idea of someone ‘crossing’ gender lines (i.e. requesting ‘he’ instead of ‘she’). So people would default to ‘she’, which was unbearable to me. So ‘he’ felt lots safer to me since it was farther away from ‘they’ and easier for people to wrap their minds around.”

If it seems like English-speakers are dissatisfied, the situation for speakers of gendered languages is worse. In the same survey, transgender French respondent #171 was clear and succinct:

“[S]peaking a gendered language as an agender person fuckin’ sucks. I’m constantly misgendered, or I’m misgendering myself in order to be understood.”

Misgendering in a gendered language was explained by another respondent:

“For example, in English, there are multiple nouns that I can use to classify myself (partner, student) without making reference to gender, whereas in German I’m supposed to say the feminine form of many common categories into which I fit, like student (Studentin), and have to explain myself when I refuse.”

In English, one can say they are a teacher with a partner, and no one’s gender is revealed; French and German lack that luxury.

Transgender German respondent #98 added:

“The options that English presents work reasonably well for me and I can express my gender identity and use preferred pronouns […]. [In] German I struggle a lot with language and [I am] often very unhappy with the situation of [the lack of] German gender-neutral language. I lack usable and easy to learn/apply pronouns and descriptions of myself. That the language is very gendered is a big problem in my life.”

Russian is a gendered language that does feature a neuter third-person pronoun, оно [it]. This pronoun is not typically applied to people — instead it is used only for objects with neuter noun names, typically borrowed words like кафе (cafe) that do not take a masculine or feminine case. A few gender pioneers, however, have co-opted it. For example, Seroe Fioletovoe [Grey Violet] — a transgender Russian activist who is part of the artist collective Война [War], best known for spawning punk activists Pussy Riot — uses “оно” to describe themself.

‘That the language is very gendered is a big problem in my life.’
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Polina Ravlyuk, a Russian blogger who runs an information portal on gender and gender identification, wrote to me in an email:

“We don’t have a gender-neutral pronoun [for people]…Agender people use feminine or masculine pronouns according to their personal preference. There can also be situations where a woman can refer to herself in the masculine way grammatically and vice versa. It’s worth noting that the issue isn’t widely discussed [yet] in Russia, because in my opinion society isn’t ready to accept gender on a spectrum. ‘Homosexual propaganda’ is still a fineable offence in the Russian Federation…”

Tosha, a young Russian who identifies as agender, told me:

“I use masculine pronouns, even though they don’t suit me very well. Plural or ‘neuter’ cases in Russian aren’t comfortable for me. Maybe someday I could use them, though. I also speak English, and I use the ‘they/them’ in English. Because of the language barrier, that doesn’t feel unnatural for me, and besides, [i]n Russian almost all the verbs and adjectives have gender, and in English it’s not like that. Pronouns in English don’t hurt me, as long as no one does it on purpose.

In my opinion, the language plays a pretty large role in how agender people feel about themselves, because [Russian] isn’t flexible enough for us. It doesn’t allow for a lack of gender; you always have to pick something. It shapes how we are thought about and sometimes contributes to social dysphoria. In my own family, it’s been difficult for most of them, though my friends, mother, and grandmother easily adjusted to using masculine pronouns to refer to me. Those who don’t know why I use that case either question it, or they think I think I’m a guy, or they just ignore it.”

Tosha also notes that there’s the option to use a plural pronoun when referring to agender people. “When I don’t know someone’s gender, I talk about them in the plural,” they say. “I think after some time I’ll be able to do the same for myself [in Russian].”

It’s clear that, not surprisingly, natural gender and gendered languages pose problems for identity expression. But what about genderless languages? Are these, then, the gold standard?

A young Estonian agender person interviewed for this article who prefers the name Paul does find “tema,” the genderless Estonian pronoun, helpful. Temais used only for humans, and when used in a sentence, it is neither masculine nor feminine. Paul writes:

“Usually people use the gender-neutral ‘tema’ [when] talking about any person, and because it’s the most common way to refer to a person, there is no issue with which pronoun to use. I prefer ‘they’ or ‘he’ in English, but I don’t usually say it to people unless they ask. That is because I am not really out as non-binary. In Estonian there is no gender in pronouns, but there are marker words like ‘tüdruk’ (girl), ‘preili’ (Ms.), or ‘neiu’ (a young woman) that I don’t identify with, but which are used by older people addressing me. I would prefer the gender-neutral pronoun ‘tema’ or my name.

Friends and close acquaintances call me ‘Paul,’ which I really like to be called. I somehow identify more with neutral or masculine marker words, and names. In English when I use ‘they’ to refer to a person, most people don’t notice it. But that’s maybe because the people I talk to in English are not native speakers. So there is some slip of pronouns going on unintentionally, especially with Estonian people speaking in English. We don’t have gendered pronouns, so a regular person might call a cis man a she by accident, and not be corrected, because we are not native speakers.”

Asexual Finnish student Kati agrees, saying, “I’m so happy Finnish has only one [ungendered] pronoun. It makes some things so much easier…one does not need to make assumptions about gender when trying to address someone.”

Having just one pronoun for humans doesn’t equal perfect equality in society, though. Turns out that genderless languages can include “seemingly gender-neutral terms” that do in fact have a sneaky male bias, just like natural and gendered languages. For example, the word lakimies (literally lawman or lawyer) in Finnish is what is called a false generic. In principle, it refers to all lawyers, but in practice, it refers only to male lawyers. Female lawyers are called just that: female lawyers. Men are the standard and everything else is the exception.

What can we take away from all this? Agender people have the hardest time expressing their identity in highly gendered languages, but genderless languages are not the utopia one may imagine. Assumptions about the binary nature of gender and the status of masculinity seem to survive intact, even under genderless language conditions. Though Estonian people using the term tema may not specifically picture a man or a woman, they invariably picture either a man or a woman, not anyone else in between.

In Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, authors Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman emphasize the politics of language itself and of having “the agency to have our own words and definitions of them, and insist upon them to linguistic passers-by.” A natural gender language with a history of borrowed words, like English, has the flexibility to create pronouns to suit a person.

This is far from perfect — but it may be the best option yet for those who identify along a spectrum.