Binary Thinking

In many languages (if not all) there are different words to refer to a male and a female. After reading Koy’s Boy or Girl, I realize that most of us will categorize stuff out of habit. I guess depending on your cultural background, the quantity of categorization will be different. By this I’m referring to some European languages like French, Spanish, and Italian where almost all nouns are already considered feminine or masculine. Relatively speaking, English is pretty gender-neutral; we use articles such as “a”, “an”, and “the” instead of “un”, “une”, “la”, “le” and/or other similar gender-indicating articles. Although English is a more gender-neutral language than some others when it comes to inanimate objects, there are still many occasions where it has become our instinct to use a gender-based word. For example, in a formal occasion, how will you greet me? Did you come up either something informal to avoid using the word “mister”? If I was a professional in a field, then using the respective title would be an appropriate way to avoid breaking gender-neutrality.

This leads up to another point, but before I continue, here is a riddle:

A father and his son got into a horrible car accident and they were rushed into the hospital. When the doctor took a look at the son, the doctor said, “I can’t operate on him, he’s my son.” Who’s the doctor?

My first guess to this was the doctor is the father’s dad (the grandfather). That was wrong. My second guess was the father who was in the car accident but wasn’t injured, but that was also wrong. My last guess was that the son had two fathers as in they were homosexual. That was wrong too. Maybe you thought the same as I did in one of these answers, maybe you didn’t. Perhaps you guessed the answer as either the doctor or driver is the step-father or god-father of the son. Sadly those are not correct either. The correct answer is that the doctor is the son’s mother. Surprised? Although titles such as “Doctor” refer to both a male and female doctors, most people automatically assume it’s a male role.

Like Koy suggested in her blog, it is difficult to determine a dog’s gender simply by looking at his/her accessories or name but we still do it anyways. I heard this riddle when I was in high school and I could not figure it out until the answer was given to me. Currently we are still unable to relieve the gender roles of all gender-neutral titles, but in the future I believe these “either-or” ways of thinking about male/female titles will disappear. For example, I believe most people have accepted that “teacher” can refer to both a male or female teacher. If this continues, then there may be a day where someone can address me in a formal matter without using “mister” and people will have to actually meet me to figure out am I a dateable person for a guy or for a girl.