Cats and gender

While I’m on the subject of the Blak Kitteh (who seems to be around again - I glimpsed his back end very briefly the other day swishing out of the cat-flap as I parked my bags in the living room) the one who no longer experiences any gender confusion himself annoys me immensely by always referring to him as “her”. For example: “she came in to eat Tiger’s food the other night” and “I wouldn’t worry about her, she seems to come and go”, and so on. My Ma had a theory of gender in the English language which went “All dogs are he. All cats are she. All veg are greens”. I always felt that there was a bit of a category error sliding in there: “greens” is a noun and not a pronoun after all, but it would have been impertinent to challenge my Ma and I was never impertinent as a child. Ho no. Interestingly, in Gloucestershire water boilers were always “he” as in “‘e’s not bin workin’ since Wen’s’day; ‘e needs the gas-man to come out an’ fix ‘im”.

Let me wrench this post away from these linguistic diversions and back to the point.

The point is that I don’t get on particularly well with female cats, though it may be vice versa of course. If there is going to be any diva-ish behaviour in this house, any prima donna-y flouncing around, then it’s going to be me that does it. If you’re going down hill fast on a hormonal cycle, you might as well free-wheel while you can.

Of course there is no way I can find out if the Blak Kitteh is male or female, but nominally at least, in my idiolect, he’s a he.

I wouldn’t mind so much, but the one who stops over occasionally has a cat which is officially a hermaphrodite. He had to have gender-counselling from the Blue Cross before they’d let him take the cat. But this cat gets the honour of a male pronoun. Now in terms of stroppy prima donna-ish behaviour, this cat could give Naomi Campbell a run for her money. Hermaphrodite or not, this is most definitely a cat which is in touch with its feminine side. The Blak Kitteh on the other hand shows no particular symptoms of gender at all, but if he and I are to rub along at all then so far as I am concerned he is male until proven otherwise.

Just to add another swirl of confusion to the mix, Tiger came originally from a household comprising a womon born womon (to steal a phrase which grates on my teeth) and a male to female transsexual.

Gender. Who needs it?