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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
I should note that I’ve not called you stupid, even when your arguments (“I was right about Iran, so people who disagree with me about this are deranged”) sink quite a long way beneath your usual levels of logic.
I don’t know if you’re deliberately misunderstanding 1984, but Newspeak was about the use of language to prevent the conception of particular thoughts. Neologisms were used to collate terms so that vocabulary would be reduced. It has the word “new” in it, but it’s not related to the phenomenon that you’re discussing.
I’m not sure what you’re wanting to achieve by declaring that it’s not “okay” to be trans. Do you think that you’ll persuade people that they’re not trans? Imagine that you persuade, say, ten thousand people that they should have zero tolerance for accommodation, that not only should they not use people’s preferred pronouns, they should correct others when they do, and should explain that this is not okay, and that it’s mental illness. Who benefits from this, and how do they benefit?
If you think that discussion of this stuff is pointless, then by all means find something better to discuss.
I’m not particularly worked up about it. I put up some corrections to false statistics that were put up, I’ve debated some points. You’re the one who is stooping to ad hominems (progressive/ wrong on Iran/ deranged) and false victimhood (“betters”/ “lecture”/ you’re your own man, not going to defer to anyone/ etc.) I’d give you advice on how to deal with it along the lines of suggesting that I talk to Jon, but it doesn’t seem to me that that sort of advice is likely to be helpful.
It’s one of the reasons that I think that the transgendered offer great hope to conservatism; they provide a forum for media interest in the science of sexual differences. Having a ton more testosterone, or a ton more estrogen (and other differences) really makes a difference to how one lives one’s life. Having people transition and experience and describe that difference within their own lives is a compelling help, to.
One of the central battles of conservatism in the 20th Century was the effort to say that sex matters, that women are genuinely different from men. It’s a battle that didn’t go well for us (although respect should always be given to Phyllis Schlafly for her fight against the ERA and to the GOP Congressmen who eventually won that fight for her, by far the biggest success that we’ve seen in that field).
In the 21st century, though, we’re seeing people making it clear that the old conservative truths are true. For decades, people have mocked the idea that having a penis makes you more qualified for work that did not involve the use of genitalia. Now we can see that having a different endocrine system is transformative. If you take a male athlete and switch their hormones and you end up with someone with the performance of a female athlete (that wasn’t true with the terrible efforts at treatment in the 1970s, because our understanding of this field was close to zero, but it’s true now). Take a female athlete and switch their hormones and you get someone with the performance of a male athlete.
That doesn’t mean that we should go back to the 1950s; although men and women are different on a macro level, the difference within genders is far greater than the difference between for most employment contexts. It turns out that having women go to college in large numbers works out pretty well. It does mean that having more CEOs being dudes probably isn’t entirely a matter of bias. The clearer it is that testosterone isn’t only important for athletes, the dumber that the strongest arguments for the most intrusive micro-regulations of the workplace look. It’s also handy from a SoCon perspective.
There’s a reason that radical feminists come down so hard on what some on this thread are calling the conservative side of the argument. They know that the primary impact of this small minority is in transforming our understanding of the majority, in telling us that sex matters. They talk about transgendered publicity being a Trojan horse for the forces of reaction, and they’re absolutely right.
Where does labeling someone a “bigot” fit into false statistics and debate?
You take the postmodernist side of denying basic truths and throw insults at the people who disagree with you.
You claim to not understand the comparison to newspeak. Newspeak was about changing the language to control thoughts. That’s exactly what this “choose your pronoun” business is about, forcing people to deny the truth by calling the truth bigoted.
I wasn’t talking about anyone in our conversation. I was talking about Paul McHugh, and it fits in because it helps explain why it is that the John Hopkins facility was shut and the false stats on suicide are so broadly spread. Paul McHugh commissioned junk science to support his efforts to get the John Hopkins facility shut down and has spent decades misrepresenting studies to try, unsuccessfully, to get other facilities to repeat that.
What basic truth have I denied?
Newspeak was about changing the language to control thoughts in particular ways. Speech has always included new words to express things that were not previously adequately described and that use of language was not part of Orwell’s model.
James, calling a third party a name is not an ad hominem. And if the name is descriptive, even if not sufficiently adoring, that is not abuse.
Crazy people are crazy. It is absolutely Newspeak to adjust pronouns so that craziness is normal and normal is insufficient.
Your fussy argument amounts to “No True Big Brother”.
As usual, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the stuff you wrote, but “I’m eager to invite Mx. Taylor to my Memorial Day barbecue” literally caused me to erupt in a fit of laughter. Thank you.