I’m not pet owner and I don’t spend much time around animals in general. (Don’t get me wrong, I love them, It’s just I know I would be a terrible pet owner.)
How common it is for people to see, let’s say, a dog and immediately just know whether it’s “she” or “him”? If two dog owners meet in a park, would it be awkward for one of them to misgender the other’s dog?
Of course, I mean without looking at the “obvious” traits.
Are there behaviors that are typical for male/female pets outside the one directly related to mating?
I recognize that within the animal kingdom, the traits are not always clear, and I guess gender is quite more flexible than sex. I would be interested in both aspects.
What about cats or other animals?
It is different topic, although I’d love to hear more about that as well. Eg. as a cis male with no transgender friends (well, not that I know of), I find myself
thinkingruminating about how impolite/distracting it is to misgender a trans person, provided one can just switch after being corrected and move on… How bad it is to make the (honest) mistake repeatedly? How is it compared to other kinds of faux-pas, like, messing up someone’s name? (Eg. repeatedly calling someone John when they are Joe, or forgetting someone’s occupation. These things do happen to my distractable mind that seems to love lossy data compression.)But yeah, it’s a huge, fascinating topic, but a different one from my intention in the OP. :)
Thanks for asking! Getting misgendered is different for everyone and heavily influenced by factors like age, weight, how far into transition someone is, how much they pass, etc. I’ve been trans for a long time I’m in a pretty comfortable place, but I still get misgendered on occasion.
How “bad” it is mainly depends on whether there is malice behind the misgendering. An honest mistake is excusable (until it becomes a pattern), an asshole is not. In fact, I unintentionally get misgendered the most by allies (ironically) but it’s never out of malice. I’d say overall it’s similar to your example of misnaming someone, especially since the two often go hand in hand. If it happens once or twice it’s not an issue, but if someone purposefully calls you by a different name (presumably one of the opposite gender) then there’s a problem. In some states your name and gender are protected, in other states it’s legally mandated to be a complete and utter asshole.
Regarding my original comment, it’s mainly frustration at the hypocrisy some people have who make every excuse to avoid using someone’s preferred name or pronouns, but then have no problem switching when it’s someone else’s pet.
There’s also this meme:
While I have you here: this is tough to hear but please believe us when we say the US is trying to genocide us. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has already issued its third warning , but getting people to pay attention has been a huge struggle for us. We’re literally just regular people trying to live regular lives.
yeah I got that message. it really shows the hypocrisy, and it makes me wanna scream.
I wonder if a far away vision of a world where the gender just slowly disappears from the language is really the best. (When i get asked about preferred pronoun, i feel i want to answer “i don’t care and no one should, let’s collectively try to really not give a f*k”.) I feel like in the ideal world all pronouns would just be gender-neutral.
But language vs. gender is yet another fascinating rabbit hole. My first language is Czech, where basically every word – even unanimous and abstract concepts like “book” have gender, and the grammar is such that effect of word “gender” spreads to other words as inflections and such. Eg. “ona spala” ~ “she slept” vs. “on spal” ~ “he slept” but “ona spal” is an obvious grammar mistake. I wonder if this makes it worse or actually better: while it makes it harder to have a gender-neutral language (the plural trick does not work: “ony spaly” ~ “they (females) slept”, “oni spali” ~ “they (males) slept” … siiigh…), I also feel it could make it less problematic in the sense that the concept of gender in language is not actually tied to identity of a person–it’s just a weird thing present in the language.
Of course, none of that applies to intentional misgendering, which is just being a huge asshole, with little to no excuse.
Edit: I missed the last–the most important—part of your post, so I was just replying casually (and nerd sniping myself on the language part).
Yeah, that’s really disgusting and alarming. I totally believe. I don’t know what to do about it but I do believe and wish nothing but failure to these hateful, cruel people.
My first language is Spanish, and I also speak French. Both are gendered heavily. I hate gendered languages but it is what it is. You can call a car “une voiture” (f) or “un char” (m). Hell, you can call a thing “une chose” (f) or “un truc” (m). I do love language studies though and find them fascinating
Unironically, good chat.
Likely quite a bit of overlap with those people that are okay with genocide happening (trans or otherwise), but at the same time are zealots about animal cruelty.