Trans Cats *Are* Cats!

Meet Toby, a Puppy Who Now Identifies as a Cat and Uses the Cats' Bathroom (a.k.a., "Litterbox")

Trans Cats ARE Cats! In this photo, a Trans Cat uses the Cats’ bathroom (a.k.a., “litterbox”)…

I am soooo proud of my dog, Toby. This morning, Toby came out as trans. He now identifies as a cat.

As I learned from the moral philosophers on Twitter, trans cats are cats. Prior to today, I thought I had two dogs and three cats. I had made this assumption based on the traditional and very bigoted belief that being born to parents from the species canis familiaris makes one a dog. I was wrong.

I am now doing the work and trying to check my cis-species-normative privilege and do better. I went to confession today, on Twitter, and did the penance I was assigned: saying one hundred Hail Oprah’s and ten Our Mother’s before banging my head into a brick wall five times. The headbanging really helped me make sense of critical evolutionary biology theory, and I am now wondering if the real reason the dinosaurs went extinct was because they all started identifying as mammals.

I am sad to learn that I was oppressing Toby, a ten-week-old puppy whom we adopted about six weeks ago. I was oppressing him because I was treating him like a dog, when he is actually a cat.

When Toby was born, his parents cruelly and arbitrarily assigned him to the species canis familiaris before abandoning him. They probably abandoned him because they sensed, on some deep, metaphysical level, that their son was actually a cat. And like stereotypical canines in our dog-centric culture, they are prejudiced against cats. Wherever they are, I hope they are taking classes from Robin DeAngelo’s dog about “dog fragility,” or that they are reading Ibram Kendi’s book Raising an Anti-Species-ist Puppy.