The Allusionist

"It's really good if we can get the changes through here - that can be an inspiration for other other countries or other places in the world," says Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir, chair of Samtökin ’78, the national queer organization of Iceland. In 2019, Iceland passed the Gender Autonomy Act, which added an option for people to register their official gender as X; with it, the country's strictly binary-gendered naming laws were suddenly transformed. Other changes, like a new genderfree pronoun, are catching on; but overhauling a whole grammatically gendered language is no easy undertaking. Find out more about the topics covered in this episode, and a transcript, at theallusionist.org/todaytomorrow2; and browse down your podfeed to listen to Today, Tomorrow part 1 about how Icelandic officially obtains new words, and navigates the challenges of being an old language in the present day; and the episode Name V Law, about the Icelandic Naming Committee and the strict laws before the updates discusssed in this episode.