[Theory] Are you a boy or a girl?

Professor Oak asks this because he forgot how human genders work. He works all day with Pokemon, so he looks for subtle differences between genders rather than the more obvious ones that humans have.

Lets say Oak looks at a random Pokemon. That Pokemon will always look like the rest of its species, the only exception being between genders and forms. Pokemon with different forms don't tend to differ between genders.

Now lets look at humans. Humans tend to look entirely different from each other. You can have long hair, curly hair, different facial structures, different clothes and so on. Oak sees these differences as different forms on a Pokemon, so he doesn't look for differences between gender and instead asks what gender you are.

So don't work too much on Pokemon, or you come off as a creepy stalker. Advice for life, that is.

Actually in Gen 1 and for most of Gen 2 you were a boy by default. It wasn't until later that you could choose what gender you were, and it's stuck with the series ever since. For Gens 2 and beyond it made sense because the player had never met the professor before, but they didn't think to retcon that for Fr/Lg. Thus Professor Oak, who should have known who you were since you were small because you were rivals with his grandson had to ask who you were. Maybe he's just senile.

Maybe he is too busy working and has bad hearing. He refuses to look up from his work and because the main protagonist is like 10, boy and girl voices are more similar.

Professor Oak doesn't see boys or girls, males or females. He sees HUMANS.

Professor Oak is against discriminations! Oak FTW!

I always had a headcanon that he was distracted, but the fact not even FRLG retconned this even after the introduction of playable female trainers is just horrendous to read about, as if that game wasn't too nostalgia-centric already.

I'm fine with Oak, as Nichole said he might be distracted or even his eyesight's failing him.

It's creepier on XY, like hello there're two mirrors there! I would understand if a Trapinch was biting Sycamore's face. But dude, seriously. {XD}

Mellan said:

Professor Oak doesn't see boys or girls, males or females. He sees HUMANS.

Professor Oak is against discriminations! Oak FTW!

Click to expand...

Hahahaha {XD}

Well hmm, why does he want to know then?

I thought like that top xD Maybe he wants the player to be allowed to define themselves as whichever gender they want. Although... You'll always look girly if you pick "girl".

Or he remembers Yellow and doesn't want to make that mistake again.

I didn't really find anything odd about it, tbh. In the original games, you didn't have that option to choose between being a boy or a girl, but in the remakes, you did. The game doesn't already know whether or not you're male or female, so it asks you in the beginning during Oak's introduction.

i can never take posts like this seriously

Well, Professor Oak had a bit of an incident once, so even if he knows if you're a boy or a girl, he asks just to be safe.

Definitely he's just too busy/can't be bothered to look up.