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The Science is Cisgendered: Gender-Neutral Cats Are the Civil Rights Struggle of Our Age
Don’t laugh at Washington Post editor Lauren R. Taylor. She is an earnest young woman with a passion for social justice. Which is why the Pulitzer-laden newspaper devoted precious editorial space to explain how she’s raising her cats as gender-neutral.
My new cats were freaking out. In carriers in the back seat of the car, they yowled their displeasure. I reassured them: “Don’t worry boys, we’ll be home soon.”
Whoops! I had called them boys, when in fact they were girls. An understandable mistake, as I’ve had cats for about 50 years, and all of them have been male. “I’m going to have to work on using the right pronouns,” I thought. And then another thought: “Why? They’re cats.”
We’ve all been there. Just the other day, Calvin the Wonderbeagle yanked a new loaf of Nature’s Pride Honey 7 Grain off my kitchen counter and consumed it in four bites. After I yelled, “Dude, why are you such a jackass?!” his mournful eyes told the story better than words ever could: I have yet to self-identify as a “dude” and certainly am no donkey. It’s just like a white human oppressor to define my species, take me captive, and exploit me as the unterhund to your übermensch. Now rub my belly.
I evolved a little bit that day. And, like Mx. Lauren R. Taylor, I too decided to raise my dog to be gender neutral, even though Calvin has a pee-pee instead of a woo-woo. Taylor’s insight continues:
The cats’ lives wouldn’t change, I reasoned, and it would help me learn to use plural pronouns for my friends, neighbors and colleagues who individually go by they, their and them. Even though using they, them and their as singular pronouns grates on many people because it’s grammatically incorrect, it seems to be the most popular solution to the question of how to identify people without requiring them to conform to the gender binary of female and male.
This oppressive gender binary is enforced by the male-oriented “hard” sciences (revealing name, that). They claim that “women” have two X chromosomes, while “men” have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome — the science is settled. More like the science is cisgendered.
Around the house, with just me, Essence and Trouble – named for Rare Essence and Trouble Funk, for the DC music lovers reading this – things were pretty easy. I’d make a mistake (called “misgendering”), saying something like “Where’s your brother?” (Yes, I talk to my cats.) Usually, I’d remember to fix it (“Where’s your sibling?” or “Where’s your pal?”). Just as I’d hoped, I began finding it easier to remember to use gender-neutral language for the humans in my life.
And I began to get an infinitesimal taste of what transgender and gender-nonconforming people face. I’m not talking about the outright bigotry and hatred –something I can’t know without being in their shoes — but the complete cluelessness. Friends would come over, I’d introduce the cats and their pronouns, and some would ask, “But what ARE they?” Some would randomly use “he” and “she.” Some would stumble, unable to form a sentence when talking about one of the cats.
Some claim that millennials are shallow for ignoring the oppression of rampant war, third-world poverty, and genital mutilation, but isn’t calling a female cat “her” a form of gender mutilation? The patriarchy’s rape culture is bad enough for humans; don’t inflict pronoun violence upon our feline companions.
If only the veterinary-industrial complex was ready to accept androgikittens.
Things got a little more real when Essence got sick. They were really sick. I took them to the vet and had to weigh the question: Do I explain their pronouns not only to the vet, but also the front-desk workers, the vet techs, and everyone else we interacted with?
I am eager to invite Mx. Taylor to my Memorial Day barbecue.
Before the illness was over, we saw five vets, two sets of front desk people, and countless vet techs. I chose to fall back on my cis-gender privilege (look it up) and used the singular pronoun for Essence. I understood that wouldn’t have been so easy if I were the patient — or if Essence were human.
While all of this was unfolding, friends would ask me: How is your cat? “They’re better” or “The same. The vets don’t know what’s wrong with them,” I’d say. “Wait a minute—are they both sick?” people would reply, confused.
Confusion privilege is to be expected when a part-time multi-platform editor at the Washington Post bravely deconstructs the deceptifice of misgendering feline phallocracy. But the real culprit is the proper grammar taught to us by adults who assumed toddlers want to identify as competent speakers of English.
It is confusing. We’ve had gender drilled into us as part of language since we first heard adults talking when we were infants – decades of “he” and “she.”
But at the same time it’s necessary. People are coming to understand that not all of us fit into the “girl” box or the “boy” box. Those who don’t are claiming space to be who they are. We all need to find ways to acknowledge and respect that. My way of respecting it just happens to be raising my cats gender neutral. You can choose your own.
Thank you, Mx. Taylor for enlightening us all. The next time I bring Calvin to the vet, I will make the staff call him “them,” because language shouldn’t be a means of communication, but a minefield of grievance. I just hope the vet doesn’t double charge me for the rabies shot.
Published in General
Neither can my wife but that has not stopped her from bring them into the house till death do they part, currently at 5 ….. Sigh…. but they are so darn cute.
Also there is nothing garden variety about Claire.
Nope she is an Internationally renown crazy cat lady.
I read it. While her intention is not to de-genderize her cats (as the title implies), her motivation is still to spread an absurdity across society by trying to alter language. I didn’t take her article as a joke.
I think you’ve hit on something here, James. Within reason, we do things for those we love that we don’t like or necessarily agree with, because we love them and want to nurture a relationship with them. If you told me you really wanted to be referred to as ___ pronoun because it was really, really important to you, I would do it (though probably with much eye rolling), because you- James- are a dear friend that I love.
Where things go haywire and get crazy is when we expect society follow suit, and never ever do anything that might offend anyone ever. That is what I think most people object to- the insistence on pandering to every possible slight that might ever be perceived by anyone.
I like them too, if they are well cooked.
[I keed, I keed!]
Sigh, nothing! I have seen the evidence, they have you wrapped around their little paws. : )
Guilty as charged, I know the flesh is weak, that is why I did not want them to enter the house, and if I was near my iPad I share last nights “sleeping kitties on lap images” that I plan to use in the future to embarrass/encourage my sons to get married and produce cute grand children.
/end thread derailment.
So do we really help our delusional friends and close ones by buying into an unreality not constrained by the facts of existence? Where is the line between personal palliative support and societal gaslighting?
You are a member of the medical profession how can you evaluate someone and relate your observations when you cannot even unambiguously describe their sex to another professional?
GLD, did she say she wouldn’t describe their sex to, say, a vet clinic? Or did she mean something more like “If you want to call your female cat George because you like George Sand, whatever–I’m not going to break up over a minor eccentricity.”
Am I still allowed to call my girlfriend, “dude”?
There’s quite a bit of gray area here.
I’ve known several transgendered people who were well aware that they were biological women, yet their brain was apparently telling them all day long that they were men.
It’s one thing for a person with breasts and a vagina to say “I’m a man, don’t tell me otherwise.” It’s another thing for that same person to say “I have the body of a woman, but my innate sense that I am a man is even stronger; I’m confused and conflicted.” That latter person is not delusional in my book, even though they do have a mental illness.
And the adversarial approach is not necessarily the most efficacious for all mental illnesses. Being transgender is not alcoholism; limited accommodation may well be much more productive than reversion attempts for a transgender person who is not delusional but aware of their condition.
The line that should be drawn is between respectful accommodation and demands for equality. It’s one thing for a transgender person who is fully aware of their condition to respectfully request that close friends call them by their non-biological gender. It’s another thing for society and laws to force us to erase all differences between genders.
N.B. Did not read the article and do not intend to.
The closest analog I can think of is multiple personality disorder (personally, I think it’s a closer match than someone convinced they are Napoleon, for example). But when Sally Field thought she was 16 different people, they didn’t say, “Yep, you’re 16 people all right”, issue her 16 driver’s licenses and let her vote 16 times. They used treatment designed to convince her that she’s actually only one person.
Granted, I’m not a psych nurse, but there are times when we correct people’s delusions and times when we don’t- it depends on the situation. There are instances where correcting and reorienting someone is helpful and appropriate, and other times when it’s harmful and even cruel to do so.
If I’m talking about a patient- let’s say a man that wants to be addressed as a woman- to a colleague, I would probably say “he” because he’s biologically a male with everything that entails. But when speaking to the patient, I would address him as “she” because it would make him more comfortable and build a trusting rapport. There are times when digging in your heels isn’t helpful. There are a lot of times when we treat the individual differently from the whole.
I am not familiar with this. Did it work?
Obviously, I was joking about Sally Fields. She played Sybil in the movie about the woman of that name. In the real life case, I believe she was successfully reintegrated.
That is an instance where going along with the behavior is not helpful. With that kind of patient, one would correct and reorient them. But like Mendel pointed out, most trans people fully understand that their biology is different from what they feel they are, and in those cases it might be to refer to them as their preferred pronoun in order to establish trust and rapport.
Sybil was a movie base on a real life person with the disorder.
The question is whether the underlying pathologies of these two examples (multiple personality vs transgender) are similar enough for them to merit similar treatment.
I imagine the short answer is that nobody really knows. But again, a transgender person is not necessarily delusional – there’s a difference between “feeling” like a man and actually believing you are a man with all of the physical characteristics that entails. So what worked for Sally Field’s character may be completely off the mark for a transgender person.
I have known a handful of transgender people who have “transitioned”. In about half of the cases their lives improved tremendously; the other half remained the same or got worse. So I’m not convinced there’s a universal best treatment.
If I’m remembering the stats correctly, your experience appears to be happier than average. I think the combined total of post-op suicides, the people who have a second reassignment to go back to where they started and the people who wish to do so are well above half.
And remember that each and every one of them convinced a battery of doctors and psychiatrists that this was the only thing that could possibly help them.
Only in the “Dude, did you really just do that…” kind of way.
Exactly. If you want someone to call “dude” all the time, you might be barking up the wrong forest.
That statistic wouldn’t surprise me (although I doubt those patients had to convince anyone that the sex change was the only option – there are probably enough health care professionals who already believe that).
Like many mental illnesses, there may be an upper limit to the satisfaction that most transgender people can reasonably be expected to find with regard to their issues of self-identity; i.e. no amount of accommodation will ever make them feel the way they want, and building up false expectations may lead them to feel even worse when their hopes don’t pan out.
But this conversation was originally about what pronoun to call a good friend to their face. That’s a much different “treatment” than a sex change, and I would imagine that accommodating a transgender person who is not delusional with such a small step might indeed be beneficial in some cases.
It doesn’t work the other way around either, my wife just gives me the whole “First + Middle” name treatment, and then I give my impish smile and continue…
Also, in my limited experience, the transgender people I knew didn’t get incredibly hung up on which gender their friends called them.
Much more important to them was whether their friends had a genuine understanding for their internal struggle, took them seriously, and let them participate in informal “single-gender” activities (like a biological male getting to join his girlfriends on a girls’ night out, or a biological female getting to play in the guys’ football game).
But maybe my experience isn’t typical.
My issue is when we go from non harmful personal placating to a societal reordering to accommodate non fact base fantasy.
Several states are getting excoriated for installing laws that are not toeing the line on who can use which bathroom so that some fraction of the population less than 1 percent can make the other 99 feel really uncomfortable.
Or like replacing our current energy infrastructure with wind and solar in a dozen or so years, but maintain a 21st century life style. This is easy math to refute, yet a huge segment of our folks think they can “have it their way” by being gaslighted with dishonest and disruptive factions in our society.
I can think of other examples of this creeping mass delusionalism and I believe is not conducive to a healthy society. At what level do we stand athwart the “flow (or right side) of history ” and yell stop?
Is there something as ubiquitous as “common sense” any longer? If not how do we flow along with the other 330 million people in our nation when we don’t agree with what “is” is.
Language does not work if there is not a standard vocabulary. Man, Woman, Boy, Girl, Sex, Gender; When do I know if we are communicating with any understand of our intended meaning?
Maybe change his name to genius and he’ll change his attitude?
John Hopkins University teaching hospital, arguably on the leading of many disciplines, one of the earlier centers performing sex change surgeries stop doing them because of the extremely high rate of later unhappiness and high suicide rates.
I understand they gave us one heck of a brain surgeon, but a lot of really brilliant folks are there.
Oh. What I knew about Sally Fields was that she was in the movie Places in the Heart, which was a good movie in spite of it being an American film. Also, that on the basis of her role in that film, she was brought to Congress to testify on agricultural issues.
All part of the grand tradition of Congressional hearings.