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Comment by roomey | Hacker News Reader

Why couldn't the doctor be the boys mother?

There is no indication of the sex of the doctor, and families that consist of two mothers do actually exist and probably doesn't even count as that unusual.

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Speaking as a 50-something year old man whose mother finished her career in medicine and the very pointy end of politics, when I first heard this joke in the 1980s it stumped me and made me feel really stupid. But my 1970s kindergarten class mates who told me “your mum can’t be a doctor, she has to be a nurse” were clearly seriously misinformed then. I believe that things are somewhat better now but not as good as they should be …

"When the doctor sees the boy he says"

Indicates the gender of the father.

Ah, but have you considered the fact that he's undergone a sex change operation, and was actually originally a female, the birth mother? Elementary, really...

A mother can have a male gender.

I wonder if this interpretation is a result of attempts to make the model more inclusive than the corpus text, resulting in a guess that's unlikely, but not strictly impossible.

I think its more likely this is just an easy way to trick this model. It's seen lots of riddles, so when it's sees something that looks like a riddle but isn't one it gets confused.

Now I wonder which side is angry about my comment.

> A mother can have a male gender.

Then it would be a father, misgendering him as a mother is not nice.

So the riddle could have two answers: mother or father? Usually riddles have only one definitive answer. There's nothing in the wording of the riddle that excludes the doctor being the father.

This particular riddle the answer is the doctor is the father.

he says

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