kontextmaschine:

gpoycat

So I told you I got this cat, I told you about that. How I got this cat from an ex-roommate who realized he couldn’t afford a cat, and I took it in, and he was so friendly and doglike. How every night he’d sleep in my lap and every morning when I was starting to wake up he’d ease me into it by coming up to cuddle in my armpit for five minutes and then burrowing under the covers with me. How when I was in the middle of a big transition and feeling pretty lonely he was kind of my rock of emotional comfort.

How I’d thought of him as a girl for a long time and now that I realized he was a boy and it was time to get him spayed I felt weird and decided to rationalize that it was a transsexual cat. That’d kind of fallen apart from being around roommates who knew the cat as a boy from the get-go, and I was wondering what to do now.

Well that doesn’t fucking matter now, because he’s dead. He went and got hit by a car in front of the house tonight. He was 8 months old.

And if that wasn’t poignant enough, I’d taken him back to my place in Pennsylvania for Christmas last year and my parents both bonded with him. They came into town for the week today and said hi to him. We went for a walk around the neighborhood and he followed me down the sidewalk a bit and then just waited looking after me. When we were done with dinner we came back, I took him inside and fed him, and then jumped in my parents’ car to get back to their hotel.

And before I got back home, my roommate called to tell me.

God fucking DAMMIT. I knew this was a possibility with outdoor cats, but everyone seems to keep outdoor cats around here, and he seemed to like it so much, and everytime I’d seen him crossing the street he’d waited for traffic to clear, but just God fucking DAMMIT, you know?

So I have this cat. It’s a male cat.

But the thing is when I got this cat as a kitten I was told it was a female cat, and I’ve bonded with it on that basis.  The full name I’d given it is Nicotine Catbutt, but I called it Nikki, and I’ve referred to it as “her” and “she” all this time. And it’s probably affected the way I cuddle and hold and sleep with and relate to the cat, because I’m a heterosexual male mammal, so I associate cuddling and comfort and intimacy and cosleeping with females.

And even now that I’ve learned, three months into keeping it, that it’s a male, it’s an effort to use “him” and “he”. If it happens at all, it’s usually in correcting myself a second after using female terms. I used the precedent of Nikki Sixx to justify keeping “Nikki”.

And I know that I should spay and neuter my pets, but now that I know this cat is male, with testicles and all, as is typical with male pet owners I feel really weird and hesitant to have it castrated.

But then yesterday I was like “wait, why don’t I solve these problems with each other?” Because if I consider neutering not as castration but as, like, sex reassignment surgery, then I not only feel a lot more okay about it, but I feel like I can keep using female pronouns and considering the cat female and everything.

So basically I’ve got a transsexual cat.

I mean god only knows what the cat thinks about all this. Doesn’t seem to have noticed anything all along.

gpoycat