The End (My Struggle #6)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

When it came to religion, one had to tread carefully, church had long since been separated from state, and now things had got to the stage where priests no longer mentioned God or Jesus or the Bible when addressing schoolchildren, since this could cause offence to the many who came from Muslim homes. It was this same ideology, hostile to all difference, that could not accept categories of male and female, he and she. Since han and hun are denotative of gender, it was suggested a new pronoun, hen, be used to cover both. The ideal human being was a gender-neutral hen whose foremost task in life was to avoid oppressing any religion or culture by preferring their own. Such total self-obliteration, aggressive in its insistence on levelling out, though in its own view tolerant, was a phenomenon of the cultural middle class, that segment of the population which controlled the media, the schools and other major institutions of society, and it existed, as far as I could tell, only in northern Europe.