WashPost Writer Admits To ‘Raising’ Her Cats ‘Gender-Neutral’

It's fair to conclude that when an article's title carries the preface "don't laugh," what follows could easily be ridiculed. Lauren R. Taylor's Tuesday online blog item for the Washington Post certainly fits that bill, as the title continued that she has "a serious reason for raising my cats gender-neutral." Taylor revealed how she once accidentally called her two female cats "boys," and used this mistake as a jumping-off point to start regularly using "gender-neutral language for the humans in my life."

The part-time editor for the liberal newspaper led with her pronoun trouble towards her cats. She conceded that it was "an understandable mistake, as I’ve had cats for about 50 years, and all of them have been male." She initially thought that she was going to "work on using the right pronouns," but soon changed her mind:

Why? They're cats. That's when I decided to raise my cats to be gender neutral.

The cats' lives wouldn't change, I reasoned, and it would help me learn to use plural pronouns for my friends, neighbors and colleagues who individually go by they, their and them. Even though using they, them and their as singular pronouns grates on many people because it's grammatically incorrect, it seems to be the most popular solution to the question of how to identify people without requiring them to conform to the gender binary of female and male....

Around the house, with just me, Essence and Trouble...things were pretty easy. I'd make a mistake (called "misgendering"), saying something like "Where's your brother?" (Yes, I talk to my cats.)  Usually, I'd remember to fix it ("Where's your sibling?” or "Where's your pal?").  Just as I'd hoped, I began finding it easier to remember to use gender-neutral language for the humans in my life.

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