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Award-winning author Gabriel Mac reads essays from his newsletter, The Faggot-Witch Whenever. Sign up, tip, and engage at fwwhenever.com.
Okay. I'm gonna read this lying down. I'm lying down. It's really nice outside, and I'm just, like, in a working while lying down mode. We'll hope it doesn't make me too stuffy because this story is called My Cat Is Trans.
Gabriel Mac:Sorry, not sorry. I got wild and tied a scarf onto Slash's collar. It's Azalea colored, same as the band around her neck, both in velvet. They were sold as part of the same set, but separately, like the company was daring me to give her such gay neck decor. I'll mention here that Sasha was assigned male at birth.
Gabriel Mac:I didn't know it when I chose her through the Humane Society partition, and finding out didn't change my sense that she was more suited to sheher pronouns. Before I got her Azalea adornment, I took Sasha to her first vet appointment and the vet tech said that her sex was in question. Apparently, the shelter paperwork said that she'd had her testicles removed, But it also said that she'd had ovaries removed. I have long had Spectacular Trans Star. That tech delivered this information like the very idea was crazy, even though cats, like humans, are sometimes intersex.
Gabriel Mac:And listen, I had never called the shelter and demanded to be put in touch with the sterilizing doctor to ask if Sasha had indeed had ovaries as well as testes or if it was a mistake on her paperwork. Because while I'd noticed it, I honestly hadn't given it a full second's thought. I should point out that there's some pretty cute pictures of my cat in this story Worth looking at if you're into cat pictures. Trying to make everyone in the room comfortable about gender, as we trans often must, I stated calmly, almost apologetically, that Sasha was born with testicles, the empty fuzzy bag of which was visible and also used sheher pronouns. The veterinarian in the room set about vigorously examining her genitals to settle the question anyway.
Gabriel Mac:Sasha is male, she said sternly, looking me very seriously in the face. She repeated it multiple times. I couldn't help but wonder if she felt that this gender lesson was especially important to impress upon me because I have a beard and was wearing ladies pants. Because I feel like even a vet who doesn't know Sasha at all must know Sasha does not fucking care about her gender. I met a trans person once before I had a pet who said that people were hostile and unapologetic about misgendering them.
Gabriel Mac:You can't expect me to get your pronouns. Pronouns are too complicated. But super apologetic about misgendering their dog. This transhuman being was very much wounded by misgendering. The dog very much wasn't.
Gabriel Mac:Oh, I'm sorry, people said when they got the dog's sex wrong. I'm so sorry. Sasha doesn't need her gender assignment to reflect her empty ball bag. My ancestors told me she was a she. Even some rando who came over to buy something off Craigslist commented that she had two spirit energy.
Gabriel Mac:When my friend Riviera came to visit, she said without knowing Sasha's genital situation that she seemed like a girl. My friend Chris similarly shook his head when I asked if she seemed like a boy. Again, it doesn't matter to her because she's a cat, but also my cat happens to be trans. Sasha is a male name that told me in the same lecturing tone. It's not.
Gabriel Mac:It's demonstrably gender neutral per Sacha Baron Cohen and Sasha Obama, also per a simple Google, which explains that it's more often a female name in The United States. My Sasha is named after the pioneering wrestler who formerly went by Sasha Banks, not because I care about wrestling, but because my kitten wrestled the other kittens in her enclosure. And Sasha Colby, a pioneering drag queen who is trans. That is, she's named after two women. The vet insisted on referring to her as he and him throughout the appointment, though I was saying she and her and had explicitly stated that those were the pronouns we used.
Gabriel Mac:Veth's rigidity, especially in front of a paying client who's so obviously genderqueer, made me feel more hopeless for the future. We live in a liberal enough place that I know she knows better. Of course, she's been anti trans educated and indoctrinated too. Like all of us. I've done mountains of ongoing work to buck mine and accept my own existential expression.
Gabriel Mac:So imagine my shock that after I tied Sasha's pink scarf onto her collar, I looked at her and felt, I should not humiliate her in this way. As she trotted around my house and her scarf slightly flopping, Sasha looked ridiculous to me. Though in her whole species, pink is gender neutral and scarves are non existent, I thought she looked emasculated, stupid, less capable, trans. Because I know she was assigned male at birth and she looked like such a girl. She looked ostentatiously trans.
Gabriel Mac:And I felt embarrassed. Looking at her, my internalized homophobia and anti transness spilled over, and I felt ashamed. Today, I woke up at four in the morning with heartache as real and throbbing as nighttime carpal tunnel. It happens sometimes. It used to happen more.
Gabriel Mac:This day, I was suddenly flooded with feelings of my second marriage, or rather, the disintegration of it. I felt the day that Nico and I sat in our duplex apartment bedroom, he in a chair, and I in bed morning time, while I begged him to have sex with someone else. It didn't feel like so much to ask that I'd be allowed to take a break from his relentless sexual demands from sex entirely while he'd just sleep with another person, any person, and that could be his sex partner and I could be his life partner. This morning, I suddenly felt how unfair it was that he refused to meet me there after all the ways I'd hustled and contorted to meet his needs for years. A year later, we were already separated with divorce papers drawn when I landed in the San Francisco Airport and saw several missed calls from him.
Gabriel Mac:I called him back right away thinking something was wrong. Only to have him start yelling at me that my father, who he knew was a rapist, called him to spread warning. I was trans. You need to know, my father said, like I was giving out syphilis, like I was committing crimes. Did you know I wasn't out yet?
Gabriel Mac:Not even to myself, quite. I had tried to tell my best friend who was also trans and they'd replied that I wasn't kicking me back into the deep wound of unrecognition again. But I had just seen my grandmother, and with the clarity of the declining, she had seen me without my telling. She said she knew who Caitlyn Jenner was. Though I corrected her multiple times that I wasn't trans myself, she called transness my, quote, current attitude.
Gabriel Mac:She called my father when I left and told on me. He called a person who wasn't even my husband anymore. I think I deserve to know, my ex husband yelled at me over the phone, if my wife is fucking trans. This morning, when I woke up, I felt about my former husband of five years. He could have just loved me.
Gabriel Mac:I could have told him I was asexual and a man with all the qualities I had before more since I have unlocked so much of myself in transitioning, and he could have still loved me. But he didn't love who I really was, and so he'd never loved me at all. Sasha wasn't raised or taught to hate trans people or women or faggots. She doesn't act any less capable or deserving of respect in her scarf as she tears around the house attacking faux fur mice or plastic forks. She is unimpeded by the gender expectations of everyone who follows my lead and she's her or veterinarians who dig their heels in weirdly hard and he her.
Gabriel Mac:When Thomas was alive, I called him he to strangers, but when he was wearing pink or pastel collars, people relentlessly shifted to her. When I corrected them, they just did it again. They didn't apologize. They entirely unheard what I said, incongruous as it was to their conclusion. He was wearing pink.
Gabriel Mac:He was female. In the early days of my transition, I found that people couldn't course correct once they'd concluded my gender either. Sometimes it worked in my favor. I spent hours printing documents once in a copy shop where the proprietor kept calling me Michael, even pointing repeatedly to my dead name, which was not Michael at all. But once he'd seen me as male when I walked in, he literally could not see otherwise.
Gabriel Mac:More often, it worked against me. It still does sometimes. It's been less than a week since a customer service rep called me ma'am by the sound of my voice over the phone despite hearing me say and seeing on their own screen that my name is the culturally male Gabriel. Right now, Sasha is curled up in the front seat of the RV in her transfem or gay pink scarf, depending on what you think about her gender, sleeping as soundly as one who needn't concern themselves with it. I thought I wasn't especially concerned with it myself anymore given how I dress.
Gabriel Mac:Do I think I'm less capable or respectable? I wonder now as they type this with gold, sparkle, French tipped nails Then when I wasn't a cross dresser or out, I guess that's what I learned by adorning Sasha. Sadly, I do. I'll work on it. I'm working on it.
Gabriel Mac:I haven't taken off her scarf and I haven't taken off my metaphorical scarves and I wish I'd been loved while being for being trans earlier.