S/o / d/o / w/o; no h/o – Uni-form conformity

Everyone starts out as a s/o or d/o.

What of people who are neither s nor d? Sorry, they can stay on the sidelines and not fill forms, or put in the closer acceptable (to society, if not to themselves) approximation.

Then marriage may occur, taking women to w/o, but not transporting men anywhere certain. This shift in women’s status is not exactly voluntary. There are plenty of authorities, and others with no real authority too, who will insist that a woman, having taken the trouble to acquire a husband, should distinguish herself indicating her w/o status, and relegate her d/o status to the background, perhaps to be resorted to in the event of the dissolution of the marriage.

Just in case you are wondering whose s, d, or w one might be, it is always a man.

What of people who don’t know their father’s names? No doubt there are people who don’t know their mother’s names either, but possibly far fewer. Maternity is far tougher to screen.

What of women who are married to a non-male? Sorry.

Any scope for a husband to declare his wife’s name on a form, as h/o, not as a co-applicant or nominee or the like? Almost none – the Indian passport stands out as an exception.

This business of anchoring one’s identity in one’s male relatives is not new, and is going nowhere very fast. The names of most communities across the world reflect this bias - father’s name, replaced, if female and married, by husband’s name for most of humanity. The few communities with matrilineal nomenclature, and the few women who stick to their birth names, undeterred by marriage, are generally looked upon as quaint, sometimes eccentric. The ways of mainstream society, many of which we accept unquestioningly, prioritise males as persons of action and decision for families. This has such extreme and disappointing fall-outs as girls in a family having to forego higher education so that the family’s constrained finances can support the higher education of their brothers instead; and teachers and administrators in professional colleges resenting female students for taking up space that would have been better justified by male students who would go on to do something useful with their training.

Matters that wedding guests are agog to determine and duty-bound to report are what the groom does, and how the bride looks. A groom’s good looks, and a bride’s achievements are bonus, not basic information. In school and college, and, in fact, beyond, you are often asked where your father works. Not many enquire about your mother. A woman is quite likely to be asked if she works somewhere. A man will be asked where it is that he works, without a thought for the many men who need to be asked if they work somewhere, so that they can answer no, and close that line of enquiry. One’s children are settled when sons have jobs and daughters are married. A man is expected to justify his existence in society by his work, whereas a woman can get by without much trouble as long as her family has something to say for itself, such as being possessed of a male member or more.

After centuries of ignoring facts and finding to our chagrin that this doesn’t make them go away, we have grudgingly accepted that there is more than a dichotomy of genders. We have also acknowledged that there are varied sexual orientations. But the simple steps of assimilating these facts into our societal interactions are nowhere near undertaken. Our forms continue to lean towards two genders (consonant with sexes, of course), and one sexual orientation, marriage to one man, and knowledge of father’s name. The many who diverge from this path can struggle and modify fields in forms with explanations that may or may not be accepted, or modify facts to conform.