A Treatise on my Cat and Gender Identity

Our family cat, Macavity, was ahead of their time.  Long before pronouns became a widespread thing, we honestly did not know whether to call Macavity she/her or he/him.  (This was way before they/them world.)  When Macavity was neutered, the vet called us and asked my mother, “Mrs. Gunn, have you gotten Macavity neutered before.”  My mother said, “No, I’m not stupid.”  And then the vet said, “Well, I’m looking at her right now and there’s nothing there.”  “There’s NOTHING there,” my mother said and the vet reiterated that, “Yeah, there’s just nothing there.”  In other words, Macavity had no female or male sex organs and thus was neither a he or a she technically speaking.  Macavity, being a cat, couldn’t assert her/him/their own gender identity or pronouns.  Thus, I think our generally calling she/her or he/him or whatever pronoun occurred to us at any point was probably okay.  We mostly used feminine pronouns, which was possibly confusing to Macavity since Macavity is a male cat from the T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. 

Whenever we talked about Macavity's birth defect or seeming lack of gender in our family, my mother, usually with a cocked eyebrow and a glass of Chardonnay, would dramatically say, "Charlene was a VERY young mother. And she had bad habits. Bad habits.” (Charlene was our family friend’s cat and Macavity’s mother.).

I usually took this as a joke but, at times, I realized that my mother was in fact serious. For the life of me, I have no idea what it means for a cat to have “bad habits.” Unless Charlene the cat was hanging out with my mother and drinking dirty martinis with her, I am perplexed. But my mother’s clear implication — and I do think she sometimes was being serious, lol— was that Charlene had been an irresponsible slut of a cat mom who’d engaged in illicit cat behaviors that led to Macavity’s birth defects. Charlene was the villain and poor Macavity was the victim with neither ovaries or testes.

Macavity would prove to be a medical curious in more than one way……. But more on that later.

Tralala.