So this week a friend and I each got a kitten, brother and sister. Here is a picture of mine under a pile of socks.
Anyway, until yesterday, she was under the impression that she had the male and I was under the impression that I had the female, but after checking all of the requisite holes (which with kittens is a lot harder than you might expect), we found out quite the opposite. This caused me to reevaluate the ways that I had treated it, considering our inevitable anthropomorphization of pets based on their presupposed biological sex.
For example, when the two would play together, he would be more aggressive and physically dominated his sister. Someone observing, believing him to be biologically female, commented that “she’s really aggressive, for a girl.” The commenter, being female herself, had unconsciously implied via anthropomorphization that her sex was inherently more passive and that males were more active. In retrospect, this statement struck me as particularly evincing of one of Bartky’s conclusions (as well as one of Paulo Freire’s) that oppressed individuals internalize the viewpoints of their oppressors to the point that they seem normative. Obviously nothing insidious was implied by the commenter in this situation (it’s about kittens playing, after all), but all the more so it should cause us to notice how deeply the vines of oppressive mentalities have seeped into our collective subconscious. My first thought when I found out that Copkilla (that’s his *gender neutral* name) was male was that I should have been giving him fist-bumps instead of hugs. I’m part of the problem, you guys.
There was a study done on the treatment of children based on their sex. Three were three groups of toddlers: one dressed in blue, one in pink, and one in yellow (males and females in each group). The children were brought into a room and adults were told to play with the children and comment on how the child behaved afterward. Adults who played with children dressed in blue made comments about how the child was aggressive and liked to rough-house. Those in pink were deemed caring and sweet. The funny part is that comments on the children dressed in yellow (a gender neutral color) got mixed reviews, and many of the adults had very little to say about their behavior. The adults were also observed trying to look down their diapers to distinguish a sex to know how to handle the child. The study sought to prove that what many people think are biological differences between boys and girls are in fact societal conditioning that starts at birth. The key is to not associate any one gender to a child based on sex. Besides that, there is the common misconception that there are only two genders. There are infinite genders, and by locking children into one of two based on their biological sex we have vastly limited who they will become as adults.
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