Love Might Be Too Strong a Word

The short story, "Love Might be too Strong a Word," created a setting in which gender did not remain within our own binary concepts. However, I noticed during class that we seemed to be unable to attempt to assign each of the newly introduced genders a binary form. For instance, we assumed that if someone had parts described as "outie" parts, we automatically assumed that person was to be masculine. We also made an assumption that, should someone's gender pronouns end in a similar fashion to "him" or "her," they should keep with our perceptions of male and female.

It was interesting to note this, especially since our class is meant to study the queer within literature. It was indeed quite queer to read a story that created new genders. But it was more interesting to see how difficult it was too discard society's standards of male and female. Regardless of how open-minded each of us in class is, in our discussion, we still struggled to use the proper pronouns instead of "he" and "she."
It might have been difficult to discard these roles simply because of the roles we were shown. It seemed that any character we assumed was male had a leadership position and was generally above the strictly "female" (by our standards) characters, the dailys. Any character to whom the maintenance and less desirable tasks were left was perceived as female.
I also found it interesting that this story showed us a character that went against its gender roles in most aspects of the society. Mab did adhere to gender roles if yr job is taken into account, because y worked as a cleaner, as all the other dailys did. However, Mab became the more bossy member of the relationship between Dot and Mab, even deciding how they would interact sexually. This would be, typically, a task left up to the pilots, but Mab chose to take this over.