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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
Sorry for the rant in 87….just a little carried away today. I must be channeling my inner King Prawn.
Oh, calling people by their full name when you’re mad or exasperated with them is built into the female DNA. There are even a couple Rico members who’s middle names I’ve learned for such purposes…
I am conflicted on this issue. The 15-year-old daughter of our dear friends has announced she is a boy. My issue is that she is so young, accommodating her by starting hormone therapy to suppress breast development, etc., seems like child abuse to me.
I believe a group of pediatricians recently came out and said as much –but they might have meant much younger children.
I am afraid I think of this phenomenon as mostly a fad.
Built into ‘female’ DNA? You cisnormative-ist.
Yes it is, and I’m ok with that because I’m speaking of the whole and not the individual. Kinda like saying “women have motherly instincts” while recognizing that an individual woman may not possess any affection for children.
Sure?…
Ok, I’ll cop to this one. It’s a character in the later Harry Potter movies. If you haven’t seen the character in action the joke doesn’t make sense, as to watching the movies, I can’t even blame my niece and nephews like some other movies adults probably haven’t watched.
Isn’t that the very definition of delusional?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion
“A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information, confabulation, dogma, illusion, or other effects of perception.”
Isn’t biology “superior evidence”?
James, the Iran connection is that we used to be lectured all the time that we were not having a dialogue with Iran, and therefore did not understand them. We understood them just fine — the message was unpleasant.
There is a strain of progressivism and of anti-Americanism which seeks to lay the blame for all bad things at the feet of misunderstanding, because its proponents are talkers, not doers, and their particular hammer is blather. The problem is re-framed so that the solution appears to be more talk.
But some of us never misunderstood Iran, and saw the clamor for dialogue as a weakening of a strong position — a refusal to engage in nonsense that will only work against us.
The hostility in this post is from Mx whatever her name is. I understand her point — her point is that ladyboys and other crazy people should be coddled, and that the infection once spread to her should spread to her surroundings, so that she may ease her own path in easing the path for her crazy acquaintances.
I am not obliged to play, and I am on solid ground calling this at best nonsense. In fact, it is one more petal of an awful flower, and I need not snort deeply from each on in order to recognize it.
This is lunacy. The woman is deranged, and she wants everybody around her to be deranged, too. Or at least to pretend that xey is.
Yup. Monstrous abuse leading to monstrous butchery.
You’re not remembering the stats correctly. There are a fair number of studies of suicide, with only one suggesting a rate of above 2%, the rest either lower or considerably lower. Around 8% of transwomen regret their shift (I’m not aware of a transman survey, but suspect the number is likely to be lower), with a small minority of them undergoing a second reassignment.
In evaluating the suicide rate, one should recall that a non-trivial portion are cut off from friends and family by the transition and almost all of them experience discrimination in deeply unpleasant ways. If you’re in a position to change their minds (a spouse, perhaps, a parent, or a child), then it’s possible that they might be better off helping them see things your way; transitioning is a very big deal, and if you can be persuaded not to, it’s likely not worth it. It’s also worth remembering that the study didn’t compare trans people who transitioned with those who did not, it compared people who’d transitioned with the general population.
If you’re not in a position to change their minds, particularly if they have already transitioned, then attempting to change their minds is closer to abuse than to kindness. I’d say a pretty good yardstick for appropriate social conduct is how you’d treat Mormons. If you’d correct LDS every time they muttered a prayer “No, you don’t mean “God”, you mean the false God worshipped by the Mormons, which you should call “Mormon God””, then by all means step in to correct those who have made the far less important error of mistaking their gender. If you think that making a concerted effort to convert Mormons who are not intimate with you and have not given you reason to believe that they would be receptive to that would make you a jerk, then efforts to convert the trans are probably no more helpful.
Paul McHugh is a crusader on the issue and responsible for a fair amount of the misunderstandings of the issue on the right. He joined the hospital with the intention of closing the program, and successfully did so in 1979. He’s since written endless articles with the same misleading arguments; the Nordic suicide study is one of them.
The field has come a very, very long way in the last 37 years. Heck, it’s been pretty much transformed in the last decade. There’s smart doctors in a lot of hospitals, including many of those that offer reassignment surgery today.
Those are not the statistics I’ve seen, and if they are accurate, I don’t see why Johns Hopkins would have changed their policy with a 90%+ success rate. As an agnostic, the Mormon example probably doesn’t work all that well with me.
Regardless, the simple biological reality is that no amount of surgery will turn a man into a woman, or vice versa. And leading them to believe anything other than that is abusive.
You suggested the groups who believed the message were the same. I agree that there have been plenty of people wrong on plenty of issues through time. I even believe that you’ve been right about many issues. I don’t believe that this is an argument that you’re right about this particular one.
It’s certainly true that ignorance is not always the problem. Do you concede that sometimes ignorance is a problem? There were lots of folks who argued that if we knew more about Iran, we’d come to the opposite conclusion. Some of those guys were experts and doves, some of those guys were experts and hawks. With hindsight, and as you and I concluded at the time, clarity supported the hawks; an improved understanding of Iran was needed for the correct response, and we didn’t respond appropriately because we did misunderstand Iran.
I get that you were ticked off with folks on the other side who wrongly thought that we were misinformed, but that doesn’t mean that you should pretend that being misinformed isn’t a problem.
You’re under no obligation to play. I’m not sure what you mean by calling Taylor deranged. Do you think that Mendel’s deranged? Do you think that there’s a large gap between Mendel’s position and hers? He thinks that sometimes it’s a good idea to accommodate people. She thinks that it’s a good idea to do so competently and she has a neat tool to improve one’s competency.
Because a bigot joined the department with the intention of doing that in 1979, and was successful. It’s pretty much the only instance of a hospital going that way, and many, many hospitals have gone the other way.
I don’t think that you’ll find many trans advocates who disagree with the first of these two sentences, so the second doesn’t seem to condemn all that many people. Surgery does help people to pass as one gender or another, though, and it does so a lot better today than it used to. Genital surgery is an ever smaller part of trans treatment; most of the transgender people I know have not had it.
This post is a good example of that not being true. Taylor doesn’t say that everyone has to go along with this. She just notes that she’s going along with it and provides a neat tool to help those who struggle. This isn’t the only site that’s engaged in significant blowback against her. Most trans threads include examples of people saying awful things about transgendered folks.
We have a transgendered Ricochet member, and I hate to think what it’s like for them to read these threads. It’s alleged on this thread, for instance, that their whole lives revolve around sex; I haven’t dealt with them outside Ricochet, but it is not my impression that their whole life revolves around sex. I’ve avoided encouraging conservative Christian transgendered people to join on the same basis, although I think that they’d enjoy the site when it wasn’t discussing that issue.
James, this post is not journalism. It’s Jon pointing out the foolishness of fools. You seem to be disappointed that Jon does not kowtow to an insane grievance.
I wish no ill will to the insane, but I will not have their problems become my problems.
Compassion yes, deference no. There is a reason that the idea of letting the lunatics run the asylum is not good.
Nobody answer that.
Yes. ;-)
And here I thought it was rhetorical.
double post.
It depends.
A person with a vagina who says “I have a penis” is delusional.
A person with a vagina who says “I recognize that I’m a biological female, but inside I feel like a man” is conflicted, but not delusional – at least in my book.
Of course, these are the ramblings of a deranged xan.
Do you feel that you’re being called upon to do so?
I feel as if, in civilized societies, we all take it in turns to defer to one another on various things. No one is my boss in all things, but there are many people to whom I will defer on many issues. Some of those people are trans. Deirdre McCloskey, for instance, is one of the most compelling authors on the need for bourgeois values in America today and one of the central sources for people like Arthur Brooks. Some are not; if you tell me something about Japan, I’ll generally treat it with a rebuttable presumption of truth.
James — you choose to defer to this, and to lecture those who do not. We’re not stupid — we’re conservatives. We don’t need lectures from our betters about how to accommodate the mentally ill. In fact, there’s much more room for charity if we’re not beleaguered by folks such as yourself into pretending that this derangement is normal — that it’s okay. It’s newspeak — it’s Orwellian. This ridiculous woman going on in the Washington Post about calling her cats by gender-blah blah blah this is pointless.
If you’re so worked up about it, march right over to Jon’s office and tell him how you feel. Perhaps you could stop haranguing conservatives about how to be progressive.
It just struck me, why the hell are there so many urinals? They appear to stretch into infinity like some sort of nightmare lavatory.
I’m agnostic on the issue of transgenderism. Male and female brains are different. It is conceivable that some people’s bodies and brains are mismatched (to varying degrees).
Men with the rare disorder, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, look and act like women despite being chromosomally male. Sex is not always a simple matter, though the percentage of the population that can be accurately labeled transgender (if any at all) is minuscule.
Thanks for providing a citation. Both sides of the argument are quick to bring up the high suicide rate. Opponents say it proves that indulging their delusions only hurts alleged transsexuals, while proponents say it proves how mistreated transsexuals are in our society. Either could be true, but without more data it’s all conjecture.
Thank you. There are children born that look like hermaphrodites, and I am sure doctor’s often made mistakes with little boys, and “correcting surgery” was easiest if the genitalia was converted to those of a girl. There was a famous case of a boy raised as a girl, and he knew he was a boy. That’s what I think of as a transgendered person.
Yes, you’re absolutely right. While biology is usually black and white, things are not always clear. Ambiguous genitalia doesn’t happen super often, but often enough; and early corrections have had disastrous results on the kid as they get older.