Beyond Black & White |
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| Written by Hannah McGregor |
| Sunday, 02 December 2007 19:00 |
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In big business, “customer service representatives” are admonished for using what retail gurus call “close-ended questions.” Close-ended questions, they say, give customers the options of only yes or no, and thus immediately cut off any possibility for dialogue. They cannot serve as an opening to draw the customer into conversation – a conversation that could potentially lead to a sale. So, instead of asking, “Can I help you find anything today?” one should inquire, “What are you looking for?” We may sneer at these thinly veiled ploys to rope overly polite Canadians into ever-greater excesses of consumerism, but open-ended questions contain a secret wisdom. 
Illustration by Nika Dias
We live in a world of close-ended questions, a world of binaries. Everything, to us, is either yes or no. On every government document, right there are the top, the ubiquitous M/F invites you to choose one side of the binary and slot yourself into it. For most people this is a simple choice, one made without a second thought. For some, however, it poses a serious problem. Take the case of children born with inter-sexual or indeterminate sex organs. In that first instant of life their parents are denied the socially ingrained urge to begin the process of “boying” or “girling” their child, the preliminary stage in what many gender theorists identify as a life-long cultural indoctrination. The child cannot be dressed in pink or blue, cannot be given dolls or trucks, cannot be plunked down in front of My Little Ponies or Transformers. Worst of all, when it comes time to fill out the birth certificate, the parents must pause before checking M or F. Who could bear such indeterminacy? As it turns out, not our medical community. As Jeffrey Eugenides points out in his gender-bending novel Middlesex, doctors are trained to think any “abnormal” sex organs indicate illness and must be fixed; the refusal, on a patient's part, to accept gender reassignment is another sign of being unwell. Unable to accept the possibility that there is a legitimate gender possibility beyond the binary of male and female, doctors insist on reassigning gender as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, for the child in question, this decision sometimes turns out to be the wrong one as far as that child is concerned. Does this imply that each person is born with a gender, that there was a correct choice the doctors could have made? Or does it suggest, perhaps more troublingly for many people, that the root of the problem lay in the doctors' and parents' insistence that one of the two acceptable genders be chosen and imposed upon the child? One key to the problem may lie in the grammar of our language: the seemingly harmless presence of a gender-binary grammatical system in fact excludes the possibility of a third or “other” gender. Boys are he, girls are she... then what is everyone else? It? They? Our very language (and similarly a majority of Indo-European languages) denies the option of a third category, or of the dissolution of categories altogether. And the feminist fondness for alternate vocabularies (the gender-neutral pronoun “ze” comes to mind) never seems to catch on. 
Illustration by Nika Dias
Similarly, so many of our black-and-white definitions, our socially accepted binaries, lack any middle term, any language to allow for a grey area. In this sense, the queer community is miles ahead of the rest of the world, ever-expanding their sphere to include endless variations in sexuality. They have attempted to split the heterosexual-homosexual binary wide open – gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, with the final option offering the possibility (almost unheard of) to be unsure of where one stands. Imagine if one day, filling in an application for a driver's license, you were to cross out that insidious “M/F” and fill in by hand, “I'll get back to you on that one.” If I have a solution to offer, it is this: poetry. Not poetry in the limited sense of verse on a page, but in the grander sense the word once possessed of all creative works, of art as a whole. John Keats famously refers to negative capability: “that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...” Ignoring that glaring reference to gender, Keats has put his finger on something essential. Art can offer answers to both sides of a problem without coming down on either side. It can even open up brave new possibilities. This problem cannot be solved with looking for answers, but with looking beyond answers, with a refusal to slot ourselves unquestioningly into one side of the binary. We must become, as Nietzsche puts it, philosophers of the dangerous “maybe.”
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