Genderizing pets and the dangers of personal → ontological relatability
Is it safe to refer to our animals as "he/she"? I am not an expert in Gender studies nor Psychology nor Animal rights nor anything. Just a humble opinion.
Flora v. Fauna
Recently I’ve been reading some of Warwick Fox’s Transpersonal Ecology essays. The idea—as I understand it—is to separate perceptions of environmental importance in relation to humanity. This view critiques partitioning humanity from nature and viewing our environment as a resource to be used for human progress, rather than developing methods to progress the environment as a whole, which should in effect progress humanity as well. As a framework for defining how humans fit into the environment, Fox defines different types of identities that humans experience, and how these identities connect to each other. Pretty neat right? Establishing a framework in which we can achieve interconnectivity with nature to increase our self-awareness and establish a mutually symbiotic relationship. However, I have an issue with extending this idea to a buffer between humans and nature: animals.
Animals are a complex category because we clearly don’t have a flat tax on the moral culpability of different species. From now on I will be referencing my experiences through Western Society in particular, and how although it is agreed that animals cannot be held responsible for their moral actions, the moral actions we impose on animals are incredibly variate. For example, we have no problem dissecting flies’ brains for our own scientific progress, but the tone of the conversation dramatically shifts when companies like Neuralink are found in killing mammals—pigs. Whether or not you agree with this moral relativity is completely arbitrary to me, as deontological/utilitarian/virtuous/whatever arguments can be made for to what extent we should unify our treatment of animals. What I care about in this post is exploring Fox’s ideas on transpersonal identification with our surroundings, and establishing a framework for interconnectivity between us and animals by inheriting Fox’s ideas.
Types of identity
I won’t go deeper than necessary in the explanation of Fox’s categories for identity, rather, I’ll just mention the aspects of these that I find value in inheriting without misrepresenting the identities. (Ideally, there shouldn’t be a sazen in my inheritance).
Personal : This is the most common form of identification. Fox defines it as “experiences of commonality with other entities that are brought about through personal involvement with these entities”. Examples of Personal identity map to our pets, sports teams, countries, etc. We have a fundamental idea of who we are, I am JP, and we map these groups as extensions of ourselves, their relativity is always dependent. A cat isn’t just a cat, it is JP’s cat. JP isn’t just JP, JP is a human with a cat.
Ontological / Cosmological : Unlike the Personal identity, ontological and cosmological are concerned with the state of fact and being rather than being a function of personal relationships. I will leave out an explanation for the Cosmological identity as I don’t see it fit for my framework. Ontological identity promotes an impartial identification of all entities, relativistically independent of the oracle. It is expressed in terms of a person being, as Wittgenstein suggests, there is an utterly astonishing fact that things are. Fox explains that this fact of the matter impresses itself upon people so profoundly that all that exists seems to stand out as foreground from a background of nonexistence, voidness, or emptiness, a background from which this foreground arises moment by moment.
I find the low quality of the image amusing. Link on gender-qualia
I believe it is important to hold these transpersonal identities in consideration not just for nature, but for animals as well. I’m not looking to deconstruct and wither Personal identities as Fox might suggest. Instead, I want to make a clear point of which animals, in relation to humans, must necessarily be perceived personally rather than ontologically, and that ontologically driven identifications of animals are harmful to humans and naturally the interconnectivity as a whole.
Relatability
I won’t make generalizations about my views on relatability, therefore further conjecture is an analysis of my own psyche.
I suspect the main force that drives our intuition towards feeling more naturally empathetic towards the pigs in Neuralink’s lab rather than flies is relatability. It follows from Personal identity that we necessarily relate our surroundings with ourselves as baseline, and the more similar something is to us the more we view it as a reflection of ourselves. Essentially, animals lack the main source of distinction that other humans engage with, natural language1. Without natural language, animals become uncanny valley creatures we map on to, albeit the mirror we are looking in doesn’t give much feedback, thus we can continue reflecting more and more Personal identifications.
Uncanny Valley parrot demonstrating an intuitively incongruent mirroring. Or as I call it “creepy but interesting”.
This isn’t inherently a bad thing, as mirroring effects without feedback can create comradery within groups of people to form teams and find connections where we wouldn’t have originally. However, there is one fatal flaw when we mirror, and it is that we cannot control which form of identity we are mirroring, as we can only be relationally aware of Personal identity, if there is no feedback, we can fall in the slippery slope of mapping Ontological identity.
(Possible) Harms of Genderization
Following the definitions of identity, I believe gender to be Ontological identity. We have seen through the trans movement recently that there is an overwhelming sense of inexplicable incongruent mapping when it comes to one’s gender identity and biological sex. However, this feeling is difficult to describe, and I assume most cis-gendered people, myself included, don’t really understand how these feelings can come into place without a socially constructed idea of gender. I’m not a gender abolitionist. I believe gender identities are somehow—whether it be through scientific analysis of the brain or other reasons I am yet to be aware of—inherent to our human experience. Just as the Ontological identity establishes, it is a fact that is. We must still take into consideration however that humans are also inherently social creatures. It would be impossible for a human that is trapped on an island and never socialized with anyone their entire life to experience gender dysphoria the way we perceive it now because there is no such human. And pragmatically, I believe they would experience some dysphoria, just not in the same context a social environment would provide.
Because we are inherently social, our interpretation of Ontological identities have to be rationalized through a personal lens, making it an impossible exercise to describe to another person the qualia2 of gender. The closest method we have to communicate such qualia are socially constructed representations of the underlying gender-qualia which can alleviate a trans person’s dysphoria within a social context. Now, what the hell does this have to do with animals?
The ultimate level of relatability we experience with non-human beings is with our pets. To such an extent, we give them human names like Milo and Chloe, dress them up in little gendered-outfits for the winter, and some studies (using this word loosely as I don’t fully trust the source) show that we have a bias towards which gender dog to adopt. We also have the saying “Dogs are a man’s best friend.” We map our Personal identities onto our pets, part of which includes our understanding of social constructivism within social norms. I don’t think the average person is treating their pets with biases humans might have against each other, but there is an incongruent use of symbols which represent an underlying Ontological identity being imposed on a being with only Personal identity.
We care about using a person’s correct pronouns because socially constructed communication connects to the person’s underlying gender-qualia. I do not want to abolish this sort of constructed speech because it serves to benefit the acknowledgment of such qualia. However, when it comes to animals, the same symbols are being used to refer to the biological fact of the matter based on reproductive organs. I don’t really have a problem with this. I’m a native Spanish speaker and we have gender engrained in the language for every object around us: la silla, female table, el hogar, male house, la casa, female house. There are movements to neutralize such language by using x or e instead of the genderizing a/o, how niño (kid) is gendered but adolecente (teenager) isn’t, it would make them both nongendered. The symbols themselves mean nothing to the average Spanish speaker, they are completely devoid of any personal meaning, much less any mapping to underlying qualia.
I don’t agree this is the case with animal pronouns and names. There is a clear image in the average person’s mind of a connection between sex-based identification and socially constructed representations of such identification. The fact is, we experience a connection between social constructivism and Personal identification, which I find harmful to the underlying gender-qualia. If the same symbol is used for both Personal and Ontological identification, this can create a socially driven obfuscation towards the importance of using pronouns to reflect a person’s gender-qualia.
What should we do?
I don’t propose a neutralization of pet pronouns, as that would be silly and impractical. The same symbol can be used for both, however, we need to break the obfuscation of social norms applied in both. By establishing that sex-based pronouns have no weight with socially constructed representations of Ontological identity, we accept that pronouns are an objective measurement of an animal’s reproductive organs and avoid a reflection of the gender-qualia. This includes giving animals more gender-neutral names (to avoid deriving an animal’s identity from an existing human being), dressing up animals in colors associated with socially constructed categories, and stop identifying an animal’s attitude as genderized and more naturally instinctual.
Pets are important to humans, and humans should be important to our pets! I want to preserve the relationship humans have with animals in a safe way that prevents humans from losing their own sense of identity. To truly achieve an interconnected transpersonal state of identity with all beings, and become “enlightened”, we have to understand why we communicate with the external world the way we do.
I don’t think any of my thoughts make any bigger claims in areas such as veganism and animal rights activism, but I’m still interested in exploring the consistency of this framework and possibly extending it to my current status as an unrepenting (auto-correct put unrelenting) meat eater. I would also like to add that this does not in any way apply to the anthropomorphization of animals in media, I’m neutral on Lola Bunny’s existence and FMABH’s Nina Tucker’s agony. These have just spawned an interesting internet subculture I do not know enough to write more about.
References
Algekalipso. “Ontological Qualia: The Future of Personal Identity.” Qualia Computing, 12 June 2016, https://qualiacomputing.com/2015/12/17/ontological-qualia-the-future-of-personal-identity/.
Gerbasi, K. C., Fein, E., Plante, C. N., Reysen, S., & Roberts, S. E. (2017). Furries, therians and otherkin, oh my! What do all those words mean, anyway? In T. Howl (Ed.), Furries among us 2: More essays on furries by furries (pp. 162-176). Lansing, MI: Thurston Howl Publications. [Part of edited book that won a 2017 Leo Award in Nonfiction category]
Liamputtong, Pranee, et al. “Embodying Transgender: An Analysis of Trans Women in Online Forums.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 9 Sept. 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7559890/.
Ontology and Method in Wittgenstein's Tractatus - JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2214349.
Warwick Fox's "Transpersonal Ecology": A Critique and Alternative Approach. https://atpweb.org/jtparchive/trps-24-92-02-201.pdf.
Natural Language: Any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation.
Qualia: the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.