I had kind of a strange experience today.
I was at the little food shop run by the Student Union today. I was busy using my debit card and the cashier (a female) who was helping me told the next customer “It will be quicker to go to the next cashier because I am still helping him (pointing at me).”
I thought this was weird but brushed it off. Then the debit machine was being weird, just took a long time. When it finally went through I mentioned that I was worried and the 2nd cashier (a male), not the one who was helping me, told me that it was their fault not mine. Then the woman standing beside me said “Oh ok, so we can yell at you (pointing to the cashier) and not him (pointing to me)”.
Now let me just say this, I don’t blame them for this slip up of gender pronouns. I am wearing a tie and my fedora today (yay for Necktie Tuesday). Also I had a pea coat and a scarf on generally obstructing the shape of my chest. My voice was also a little more hoarse than usual as I have a bit of a cold. Overall I might seem more male than I usually would.
I did find it strange that they were both talking about me in 3rd person and that neither of them would look me in the eye. Almost as though I was different and separate, only the guy would look at me and talk to me. I’m not sure it was because everyone thought I was a man or that it was because everyone thought that I was trying to be a man.
More than anything this incident makes me mad because it just shows the pervasiveness of gender in our culture, right down to our very language. There are no pronouns for those of us who don’t “perform” gender “properly”, to use one of Judith Butler’s ideas (though not her wording). One must either be male or female or else you just end up sounding pretentious using words like ‘one’. I believe that our culture (and others) needs an actual unisex pronoun, instead of just using the masculine as such. By using ‘he’ as unisex it erases the femaleness of an object making it completely male.
This can be seen with adrogenous things, my favourite being the trickster Loki ‘he’ actually has both masculine and feminine aspect but by labling ‘him’ ‘him’ the maleness overcomes the femaleness. Thus ‘he’ loses an important aspect of ‘his’ character.
We need something more than he and she.
