Cats and dogs
We spend a lot of time talking about women, men, men who identify as women, and why all of this matters. There was no way for me to write that sentence that wouldn’t piss someone off. So let’s unload the language. Let's talk about cats and dogs instead.
Cats and dogs are different. This is just a neutral fact and not a negative judgment on either cats or dogs. Walking down the street, you can confidently pick out cats from dogs—though confidently isn’t really the right word for it. Automatically is the right word. You don’t think about it. Your brain automatically processes a tremendous variety of information and still sorts: these are cats, however taciturn or puppyish, those are dogs, even though some are so tiny they could sleep inside teacups and others so large they could pull carriages. If anyone over the age of two-and-a-half asked you whether you were looking at a cat or a dog, you’d look at them funny and wonder whether some kind of body-snatcher-style alien invasion had taken place.
It’s not enough to say cats and dogs are different. Cats and dogs are different in ways that matter. And while plenty of households bring cats and dogs together under one roof with a minimum of barking, hissing, and bloodshed, settings like animal shelters separate cats and dogs—for good reason. Dogs and cats generally need different environments, tolerate different noise and activity levels, and so on.
But let’s say an activist movement emerged, brandishing a new and urgent mission, calling for the need to recognize the full spectrum of feline diversity. At first, the ideas sound a bit wacky: instead of ‘cats’ as everyone on earth has ever known them, we now learn that there are two ways to be a cat: you can be a feline-cat or a canine-cat.
What if this activist movement successfully redefined ‘cat’ to include both feline-cats and canine-cats and reorganized society—from animal shelters on down—along these freshly drawn lines?
What if every organization that focused on cat rescue was accused of hating canine-cats and wanting canine-cats dead? What if such organizations were attacked anytime they tried to defend their original missions and refused to shift their focus to canine-cats? What if every time you tried to talk about cats and their unique needs, you were 'dogged' to specify whether whatever you have to say is ‘inclusive’ of canine-cats?
What if you embraced the redefinition of cats as a mixed-species category but still wanted to focus your advocacy efforts on feline-cats because the way feline-cats and canine-cats differ still matters—just like everyone once unproblematically acknowledged that difference between cats and dogs existed and mattered? What if the effort to create new feline-cat spaces was also tarred as hateful and exclusionary of canine-cats?
What if everybody insisted that of course you can still make a distinction between feline-cats and canine-cats—nobody’s stopping you!—but every time you tried you got denounced as someone who’s contributing to a culture of exclusion and violence for canine-cats? In other words: nobody’s erasing feline-cats but you're not allowed to draw distinctions between feline-cats and canine-cats in any forum where that difference might matter.
Would we have a conflict here—or does 'canine-cat inclusion cost the critters formerly known as cats nothing?
Can we add men and women back into the picture now? Do we have a conflict here?
Of course we'd have a conflict!
FWIW I'd just like to say that I have always been unashamedly pro-feline...😉💅
You are giving me flashbacks to the wretched hour-plus in 2015 when I had to sit through a fully staged children’s theater production about a dog princess named Chou-Chou who “always felt like a cat on the inside.”