Orlando is fundamentally, and perhaps most importantly, a love story.

Based on a novel by the groundbreaking writer Virginia Woolf, Orlando, for her, was first and foremost a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, a fellow writer in the 1920s with whom Woolf had been having what today we could call a polyamorous relationship.

Nearly a century before the use of they/them pronouns became a way for advocates of non-binary identities and gender fluidity to break the grammatical grip of gender- and hetero- normativities, Woolf deftly uses they and their to convey the transition and overlap as Orlando adjusts to his/her/their new body and emerging identity:

He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and … we have no choice left but confess—he was a woman… His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace… Orlando looked himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and went, presumably, to his bath.

We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orland had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory—but in future we must, for convention's sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he'—her memory then, went back through all of the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle.