Do you remember back in elementary school, English and Filipino teachers would give you activities on grammatical genders? Itd be like, theyd have this list of words, then youd have to label it, masculine (panlalaki), feminine (pambabae), common (di-tiyak), neuter (walang kasarian). What utter stupidity. Do they still teach this in schools? English and Filipino do not have grammatical genders. Not even he or she has a grammatical gender worth discussing, because in both languages gender does not affect how verbs agree with their subjects, adjectives with their nouns and so on. This isnt like French or Hebrew, where ton frère (your father) becomes ta mère (your mother) because mère is feminine. She washes the dishes is still he washes the dishes, even if you change the tense or the mood. This might seem like a mundane issue to you. But aside from being linguistically irrelevant, it only reinforces gender stereotypes and gender roles further. I remember my answers being marked wrong then because I answered masculine for soldier and feminine for nurse. Whats worse is this gender-based, linguistically irrelevant categorization of words makes no accommodation for transgenders, genderqueers and so on. It subtly tells children that not fitting into this categorization is abnormal. Is there any proof that this thought has pervaded our consciousness? If the last sentence of the second paragraph didnt make you feel wrong, thats a good sign.
Posted on: Tue, 27 May 2014 01:46:59 +0000
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