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?
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.