(Likely) Childless Woman Raising Her Cats “Gender Free”
http://downtrend.com/robertgehl/likely-childless-woman-raising-her-cats-gender-freeApril 5, 2016| by Robert Gehl
I’m going to hazard a guess that Lauren R. Taylor doesn’t have any kids.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but anybody who obsesses so much about the gender of their cats can’t possibly be a parent.
Because every parent – unless they’re insane – would tell Ms. Taylor that she’s out of her bleep mind.
Taylor is a women’s self-defense expert, she’s also a part-time writer with The Washington Post. It was in this venue that she decided to explain that she’s treating the cats as if they had no gender. Her cats. This is practice – she says – for treating everyone as if they were gender-neutral.
Here’s how she starts out:
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.”
That’s when I decided to raise my cats to be gender neutral.
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. It also just feels right to refer to people as they wish to be referred to.
She describes what it’s like to explain to people that she’s doing this idiotic thing. Her friends would ask about one cat and she’d respond “they’re ok,” using the plural pronoun. She knows it’s grammatically correct, but doesn’t particularly care.
Amazingly, she considered continuing this nonsense when one of her fats had to go to the vet.
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? 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.
All of this “training” is necessary, Taylor writes, because people don’t fit into the “girl” or “boy” box anymore.
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.
Thanks, Lauren. I’m a little too occupied with raising my son and daughter (a boy and a girl) to fiddle about with the damn genders of my cats. Thank you.
