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This article originally appeared on The Establishment and was republished here with permission.

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?

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, non-binary, 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 into 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!”

*Estonian, Finnish and some Chinese languages 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.

“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.