In the Middle

Recently, in the process of writing I had to talk about genders and I recall stopping for a good five minutes only to contemplate whether assuming that there are two genders is politically correct or not. Google-ing it didn’t help either, and I never really got an answer to my question as to whether the transgender counts as a separate, third gender, etc..so I just had to go with my gut and say, two genders it is. Anyway, it only occurred to me now that the whole thing was unusual. The fact that there are only two genders should have been like an axiom to me, something as solid as the fact that the sun rises in the morning and sets at night, or the fact that if you throw a ball up in the air, gravity will pull it down. Now, if it were my mother or father writing, they wouldn’t even have given the thought another second. Perhaps, the thought wouldn’t even have occurred to them at all. And that, I think is one of the places where lies one of the biggest differences between our generations. Our fathers and mothers are a generation of black-and-white, where nobody would hardly ever need to think twice about an issue. In their world, there are no if’s. In their world, one is either rich or poor, smart or stupid, male or female, native or foreign, etc. We, on the other hand, are a generation that has been taught to accept, to adapt, to eradicate discrimination, and avoid assuming things about others without learning facts of their individual backgrounds. When we were in high school, most of our persuasive speeches were on defending rights of minority groups; in college most of our visiting lecturers come from a minority background. There are many times we have to think about whether what we say might offend somebody in the room. In short, we are slower to jump to conclusions about a stranger than our parents, but we are also not entirely non-judging, so we’re sort of a generation of in-the-middlers.