He, she or it
I’ve always had a problem with sex. No, not in the sense you’re thinking about. Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m talking about identifying animals and babies as “he” or “she” and then being wrong about it. Birds are easy to identify because the male is always the better looking and some would argue that’s true with humans too. We used to raise mallard ducks and they are a dead giveaway because the female is always a drab and dreary muddy brown while the drake is very colorful with a bright blue or green ring around his neck. The female ducks seem to quack a lot more too.
I’ve never had a problem identifying the sex of chickens, hogs or horses and I’ve been around so many cattle in my life I can tell their sex just by looking at their heads, I don’t even have to see their toolbox. I’ve also raised lot of sheep and can usually tell what sex they are immediately but if the males have been castrated it makes it a little more difficult. With older sheep I can usually guess right about 100% of the time. But I’m not so lucky with cats and rabbits who are impossible to tell. Goldfish and fluffy itty-bitty dogs aren’t exactly a piece of cake either.
Just the other day I saw a beautiful collie and complimented the woman who owned her by saying, “My, you must take great pleasure in owning such a fine looking dog.”
“It’s not a dog, she’s a bitch,” said the person I thought was a woman but turned out to be a man.
Of course I was just referring to the colloquial term for canines but people have become real sticklers these days when it comes to vocabulary. I think it has something to do with political correctness. Take people for instance. It used to be a human was either a male or a female but these days there are some 52 official ways to identify the sex of a person. I liked it better when there were only two. Babies used to be especially easy for me because the parents would either dress their child in pink for girls or blue for boys. Now that they’re dressing them in peach, turquoise and mauve I have much more trouble. There are other ways to go with the odds in identifying the sex of babies. For example, some professor with way too much time on his or her hands has figured out that returning soldiers, male abalone divers, fighter pilots and anesthetists tend to have more girls than boys so I always try to find out the parent’s occupation before I try to guess the sex of any baby I comment on.
People are getting as hard to tell as oysters and clown fish who can change their sex almost on a moments notice. I guess now you can say the same thing about people with “gender reassignment surgeries.” Just the other day I saw a couple of women visiting my bachelor neighbor and I made a snarky comment to him about the two ladies who came calling. “They weren’t both women,” he said. “That was Jason and his mother. You know Jason. You gave him your old computer.”
“That was Jason,” I exclaimed. “The one with the long blonde hair, earrings and capri pants?”
Things have gotten so confusing now I usually wait until I see which restroom a human uses before I’ll commit to calling them a “he” or a “she” but with the advent of unisex bathrooms I’m back to being left in the dark.
For awhile I classified all babies as “its” but one especially sensitive parent got real pushed out of shape about me referring to her baby as an “it” so I’ve had to change my tactics. Now I just go with the odds and since 50.8% of babies are born male and 49.2% are born female I’ll usually just say, “That’s a beautiful baby boy you have there.”
Invariably the parent will say, “She’s a girl, I’ll have you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I’ll say. “I didn’t know you were her father.”
“I’m not, I’m her mother.”
Sometimes you just can’t win.
