You generally do not gender an animal- you sex it. So IF your cat somehow had concept of something like gender- having a penis would still make it male. How would you even gender an animal? What are your gender roles for hamsters or dogs for instance? Most people do not ascribe gender roles to animals, although they may allow their concept of human gender to influence their selection of things such as a pink color for a female, or a traditionally non gender neutral name... however humans do not just ascribe gender behavior to animals- but anthropomorphize them in general- applying human logic and empathy to an animal which may have a very different set of emotions and perceptions. So regardless- the idea of misgendering an animal is hogwash if we examine it for even a second, unless we make it part of a larger argument which would simply be that humans shouldn’t interact with animals unless they can communicate complex thoughts with them- which is also obvious crap.
I do somewhat agree. I had the thought while writing that but would have made it longer and too complex. There’s room for murkiness but... homosexuality isn’t a gender but a sexuality. However it does not simply mean an attraction to one of the same sex but can mean gender as well. So a born sexual male who identifies as the female gender and dates a biological woman who identifies as female gender could be described as homosexual. Likewise, a biological male identifying as female could date a biological female identifying as male and one could argue both that is heterosexual and homosexual. In the end though it’s the individuals right to define how they view the relationship I suppose. That said- with animals we return to the fact that we can’t really conceive of gender as they do of at all. We know that many species of animals DO have distinct differences between male and female in appearance, behavior, mating behavior, etc. we do know that in certain species, a given sex behaving...
... or looking a certain way might entice the opposite species to try and mate with them- and we know that in some cases the same sex animal will be receptive and in others it will not. However.... we don’t actually know the mind of the animals in question. If they are aware it is homosexual and like it? Don’t care? Are they unaware and think they are mating a female? Are they unaware or don’t care about sexuality and gender as all and simply have sex with whatever a combination of chemistry and aesthetic makes appealing for them to have sex with? Dogs for example- male and female- will often “mount” other dogs regardless of sex. They’ll mount other species or even inanimate objects (which somewhat casts doubt on theories of it simply being an act of dominance unless they intend to dominate that lamp...?) So we don’t actually know that animals even have a concept of sexuality or sexual orientation at all....
... the original post in the meme fails on another level as well. In saying we cannot apply human imposed gender concepts on animals, they are not only imposing human gender concepts on animals, but failing to recognize that most species of animal are intrinsically different in behavior and processing. A Rabbit doesn’t think and perceive and conceptualize in the same terms as a dog. A cat smells rotting flesh and it’s like a nice scented candle where as to certain herbivor prey animals it is a terrifying and unpleasant smell, and so on. So even at that we can’t simply lump “animals” together- and let’s not forget humans are animals too. “Animals” can be very different “culturally” and so we can’t really speak universally about how all animals would process ideas of gender or sexuality even if it were possible to communicate with them on the subject directly.
So I think in the end- near as we can tell, if we lump all animals including humans into one giant pool and were to make a universal rule- going from a human perspective (as we can’t go by any other which we do not know,) we have to pretend to be dealing with a person from another culture we know little about, as though we were both deaf and illiterate. In such cases, it’s unlikely that either entity would be primarily concerned with what the gender of the other was. As a generality- people do not tend to treat non human animals much different based on sex or gender- much of the time not even knowing or caring the gender of an animal. So beyond the animals personal identity and pronouns, which given we do not have evidence to suggest animals knownor are terribly concerned with pronouns, there is little effect. You could have a dog or horse it’s whole life without knowing if it were a boy or girl and it wouldn’t functionally impact your relationship at all. So we “gender”...
... animals for our use and benefit because we are used to dealing with things in such terms. To the animal, we have no evidence to suggest there is any difference not danger of discrimination. That is of course if we gender animals at all- in practical use animals are generally sexed and not gendered. We don’t really care what an animals gender is which is sad and funny when you think about it. Some far right winger has a Transgender homosexual dog which is socialist by nature- and they love it based on who it is and not those factors- but we can’t do the same for humans. So really it isn’t that we misgender animals but that we don’t care what they do so long as they don’t shit on the rug.
And YES, just when you thought mankind has reached its bottom, some trolling moron showed up and was scarily not trolling but only speaking their mind.
The thing is cats don't care about gender because animals/mammals *usually* don't really have gender roles apart from the obvious biological stuff. I feel like for example giving birth and nursing kids is natural and shouldn't be contested as some kind of strict gender roles stuff. But humans (and religion especially) have put gender roles on fucking overdrive and now many people wonder why the fuck should wearing a certain colour and cut of clothing or painting shit on one's face or growing one's hair or supposedly being bad at driving (which is a myth anyway) be tied to that person having a vagina.
Idk. Maybe I'm graygender or whatever (I couldn't care less about labels) but I just don't really feel like this arbitrary ass characteristic should influence my life whatsoever.
It shouldn’t. That’s the flaw of binary genders. The KUBARK manual has one of the most profound statements on the fact. When interrogating a person, being able to use deduction and generalization to quickly catagorize them into a certain personality type allows one to determine the methods to motivate cooperation. However- hardly if anyone will ever fall neatly within a system of classification. One must classify as prudent and adjust their approach based on the actuality of the human in front of them and not a set of parameters on how general categories of people behave and react. Likewise- we have 2 genders so people throw a person into one or the other even though there is a broad spectrum and many exceptions to a persons behavior in alignment to gender roles. The roles exist to try and help us classify people easily but instead we try to force people to match the classification instead of shifting our perspective to match the person in front of us.
The generalization of a person into a catagory is meant to assist our investigation into understanding the actual person. It is not meant as an end to a process where once we have determined the broad group we think fits them best we are done. A two gender system doesn’t begin to even scratch the surface of all the possible combinations of human we could encounter and gives us little relevant information to base meaningful conclusions off of. But people have perverted the concept from a tool in a time when the relevant information we sought was “danger/not danger” and “can I sex it and have a baby/no baby but maybe can sex still” to a way of life. For better or worse as a society we have incorporated gender into our personal identities even if that makes very little actual sense. In short- it’s backwards. Gender doesn’t determine who you are, who you are determines what gender roles should be perceived as.
Idk. Maybe I'm graygender or whatever (I couldn't care less about labels) but I just don't really feel like this arbitrary ass characteristic should influence my life whatsoever.