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The three of us finished showering and went to our lockers, which turned out to be next to one other. For example, about eight years ago, I was taking a shower at a gym, in an open stall in the women’s locker room, opposite a woman and her little kid, who couldn’t stop staring at me. As someone who is often the object of children’s gender curiosity, I have observed how this training occurs. We are trained to do this from an early age. In our minds, gender is tied to primary sexual characteristics, but we do not actually base our judgment of gender on them we just assume them from other clues. (My standard poodle, born with male genitalia but perceived by most people in my neighborhood as a girl, is an exception.) This illustrates a certain truth about gender, if not about dogs or cats. Now, you know that what I’m about to say is true: we humans have a perceptual bias, in that we think all dogs are guys and all cats are girls. In this sense, dogs have only one kind of gender: their gender as perceived by others.
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But, I suspect, they cannot form a gender identity they cannot intentionally act in accordance with gender stereotypes and they definitely cannot tell us their pronouns. They can make a sad person feel better, save a person from drowning, sniff out drugs and explosives, hunt down other animals, do a real bird-dog, and aid in catching terrorists. For example, when I am asked about my correct pronouns, I often tell people that they can use whatever pronoun they consider appropriate-partly because I generally won’t hear them refer to me in the third person, but also because gender is not only what I say I am but also how you see me.ĭogs can do a lot of things. With humans, it is the interplay of all of these. But gender is also the perception of others. Pressed by reporters on Tuesday, she said, “I won’t do that, because then you’ll say that I was talking about somebody’s sex or gender, so I’m not doing that.”īut can a dog be said to have a gender? I would argue that it can. Kellyanne Conway, a counsellor to the President, refused to commit to a gender for Conan. Pool reporting from the White House yielded mixed results. Special Operations Command, countered with a description of it being a “male dog.” The White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, insisted that Conan is a boy. The next day, however, ABC News reported that Conan is a girl. The Washington Post provided a handy recap: on Monday, President Trump appeared in the Rose Garden in the company of Conan, a Belgian Malinois that had participated in the raid that killed the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and referred to the dog as a boy-understandable, given Conan’s name. This is the story of Conan, the dog of infinitely shifting gender. In a shocking twist, the best gender story of the year has come from the White House.