“You can’t partly agree with me and you can’t partly be lesbian.”
is a quote from the Netflix series Grey’s Anatomy. Here, Dr. Hahn, a world class heart surgeon, accuses Dr. Torres, a orthopedics resident in the same hospital, of partly agreeing with her to report their hospital on a misbehavior and only partly being committed to a relationship with her. As I was watching the show, this quote led me to think that the refusal to accept any partial status is not just in decision making or relationships. We like viewing the world as an entire dichotomy; we want to know if it is a yes or a no, if it is right or wrong, if it is a success or a failure.
Here are some examples of the most prevalent dichotomy in our society. With the Olympic games happening at the moment, popular and catchy news headlines start with A won/lost to B, the reason and the score coming second in importance, because we define each team as a winner or a loser and nothing in between. In an exam, we want to know if you are ranked first or not (especially in a Korean educational system), and more often than desirable, only the first-place winner is remembered. When talking about people, we say a philanthropist is good while a criminal is evil and even if there is a but… that follows after, not a lot cares to listen for that long. Our society is largely dichotomized, because a definite answer of either this or that comforts us and makes it feel like the question is fully answered.
However, the problem is that so many gray areas exist. When we are asked about our opinions on a cause, we often agree to a certain extent. For example, I and pro-abortion to a certain extent and pro-capital punishment to another extent. That is, my decision of whether I argue for or against an issue depends entirely on the situation and I do not have an absolute yes-or-no answer that the dichotomized society would like.
And there have been and still are a lot of problems occurring from this dichotomized thinking. The discussion on gender identity originates from the tendency and the willingness to divide all people into two groups, men and women. Hence, dichotomy dictates that one is either a man or a woman and never both or neither. Therefore, those that could not identify themselves with either end became the outcasts of society, because the people “in the middle” did not have a place to stand in the dichotomy.
Another example is something we hear quite often from children and adolescents with mixed backgrounds. For example, a friend of mine comes from a traditional Indian family. Her parents have Indian passports and she speaks Hindi at home. She loves Indian food and culture and visits the country every few years. However, she was born in and lives in the United States, speaks English better than Hindi and wears jeans and sweaters. She often is mixed about her own cultural identity, as she thinks that she is too American to be a true Indian and too Indian to be a true American.
Thankfully, nowadays society has changed in a way that recognizes that gray areas exist. We now acknowledge that some people do not find their place as either one or the other and accept that some of us are outside of the two extremes and that is fine and normal. I personally believe that escaping from our comfort zone of categorizing everything into one of the two options is necessary for the equality and inclusion of all. What are your thoughts on dichotomy?