I Want to Be a Dog
By: Stella Luna, They She
Tags: Gender, LGBTQ, Transgender, Dogs, Creative Non Fiction

I Want to Be a Dog

Everyone has something they want to be when they grow up. Maybe you want to be a doctor or a pilot. Maybe, you want to be a pop star, or just be pretty on the Internet! I was thinking about this recently because what else am I supposed to do when I’m stuck inside all the time and woefully unemployed without any career trajectory? Swaddled in a new comforter, I finally realized the answer — I want to be a dog.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

You might be thinking — Stella, baby… what the hell is this? Or, you might even agree with me. If you’re trans, you might understand what I’m getting at when I say this. Even though I’m lucky that most of my family respects my pronouns or just doesn’t refer to me in the third person, I have to take care of an elderly relative who expressly refers to me as “he,” “him,” and all the fixins, even after both I and my mom constantly correct her. What connection do these two things have, you might ask? Well, let me enlighten you (I promise this isn’t some otherkin situation).

For my old, old, old relative, dogs are boys and cats are girls thanks to some weird, pseudo-sexual connection between cats’ “sensuality” and dogs’… I don’t even know what the other reason is (the mid-1900s were a trip). I have one female dog and one male dog, and she often calls them “guys” or “boys” by mistake. She sometimes doesn’t catch herself, but when she does, she says something like “Boys, I said, how silly- boy and girl,” or just uses their names. Even though my mom respects my identity, she still slips up occasionally, but never with the dogs. She corrects other people’s misgendering of them almost as vehemently as she does when I get misgendered. This is when it really hit me:

Cisgender people care more about correctly gendering a dog than a trans person.

If you’re trans, you’ve probably seen, felt, and joked about this plenty of times. I do it myself all the time and have even aired it as a frustration when my relatives used to mess up my gender. It’s so odd — whenever someone needs to adjust to new pronouns, they huff and haw or get flustered and apologize, tripping over their words. They say “Oh, I just knew you as he, and it’s so hard for me to get used to it,” or “This is just so new to me, sorry, sorry, sorry-” Yet, lo and behold, if someone accidentally calls a dog the wrong pronoun, it’s like the person just spat on their mother’s grave. Cis people will, quite literally, get more upset over someone misgendering their dog than a trans person.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

For the dogs, it’s something indisputable. They are what they are. Penis? Boy. Vagina? Girl. As for my gender? Not so much. Obviously, to us, sex and gender are two completely different things. For a lot of people that don’t understand trans things, they’re completely inextricable. That’s why there are so many people, even those with good intentions, who will ask trans women “Oh, so you’re, like, a man?” or “You were a man?? I can’t even tell!”

Unfortunately, while cis people get the right and luxury of having a gender that’s completely non-debatable, there will always be some amount of “original gender” left in us, according to some less savvy cis people. We will never really be what we say we are, because our “biology” is the truth. I’m not even going to get into all the reasons why that’s wrong here. To me, it feels like I’m constantly having to assert my gender to “prove” to people that I am what I am. That mental exertion is exhausting. Why should I need to prove that I deserve basic human respect just because I know that I’m something that isn’t reflected in basic understandings of biology and psychology?

So, that’s why I want to be a dog. I don’t have to worry about getting a job (because it’s much more difficult for an LGBTQ person to get a job and be respected at it). I get to be super cute and nobody stays mad if I piss them off for some reason. Most importantly, though, I’ll have my basic rights respected and people will not only think of me as what I really am, but will fight other people tooth and nail to respect and validate my identity. They’d say I’m nonbinary as if they said 1+1=2. They’d say I’m a woman and it would feel the same to them if they said “the Earth is round.” Even though dogs have literally no concept of gender, people will rush to point out that their set of genitals doesn’t match what someone called them. However, cis people will literally do Olympic gold medal mental gymnastics to think of a bunch of excuses for misgendering someone/slipping up even after years of knowing what pronouns they should be using.

Photo by Andre Ouellet on Unsplash

Even before coming out, it was obvious that cis people were entrenched in and obsessed with gender. Instead of thinking of the obvious reason for why I acted more effeminately, grew my hair out, and even put on makeup and never referred to myself as a man, they’d literally do spy movie laser avoidance around the simple answer of me being trans. People would call me a “rockstar” or say I looked like a metalhead. They’d just say I was “sensitive” (which is true, but there’s always an implied “for a guy” after it), or basically would imply that I was at most cis and gay. I have literally said that I hate being tall, and when people responded that it’s good to be a tall guy, I would say “I know, that’s why I hate being tall.” I swear, I could have hit some of these people with a neon sign that said “I’m trans” and they’d say, “Ow, man! That’s not cool dude. Man up and apologize.” Instead of thinking, “Wow, this effeminate person who never refers to themself as a man and has literally said they hate being tall for its association with manhood probably isn’t a man,” people would just not understand that the possibility of my transness even existed.

Photo by Daniel Clay on Unsplash

So, where exactly am I going with this? Basically, because we’re so wired to assume cis-ness, trans people are often disregarded or just seen as a fake version of their gender. Everyone says trans people are so obsessed with gender, but are we the ones correcting people who call a dog with a penis “she”? Are we the ones burning down forests just to show people what genitals our baby is going to have? Are we the ones saying that a little blubbering male baby has a “girlfriend” and is a “lady-killer” when it doesn’t even have the ability of metacognition yet?

Basically, I’m just pissed off. At what, exactly, I’m not sure. Gender? Sex? The cultural understanding of gender? Dogs?? Not dogs, per se, but the frustration surrounding them is what really makes me angry. Nonbinary people will say, “Hey, I don’t feel comfortable with binary pronouns. My pronouns are they/them.” and their (well-meaning) cis friend will say “This is so-and-so, she uses they/them pronouns.”

Whether it’s cis people’s fault or not, trans people are often seen subconsciously and consciously as the gender that their appearance falls into the societal idea of. I can say I’m a woman all I want, or nonbinary or whatever, but if someone sees me as a man, they’ll most likely think I’m a man, even if they use the right pronouns. Having this subconscious idea in their head instead of trying to unlearn it as best as possible (I’m aware that it’s partially biological) causes slip-ups, and “slip-ups” can ruin our days, weeks, or even years if it’s really traumatic for some reason.

All I’m saying is that if I were a dog, people would just take a peek at the old undercarriage and say “oh, that’s a girl” or “that’s a boy” and I wouldn’t give a fuck! I’d just keep on wagging my tail, free from the social and mental consequences of society imposing a gender on me that I didn’t want.