What Kind of Cat Is That
A few weeks before Christmas our cat, Fuzz Aldrin, started acting funny. Not funny ha-ha—his sense of humor still revolved around knocking glass things from tall places and running around in the middle of the night as if his tail were on fire—just a little peculiar. He would chirp little mews for long stretches of time and rest oddly on his back paws. We had seen behavior like this once before, when Fuzzy got himself entangled in an old mouse trap (the merciful adhesive kind, not the instant-death snap variety), which left a sticky resin to his paws even after multiple washings. At that time, he laid gingerly on his hocks and constantly vocalized. Now, it didn't appear that he had stepped in anything and it continued for days, intensifying around sundown.
He gave no indication that he was sick. Ill cats find secluded places to wallow in their illness and ol' Fuzz was as social as ever, perhaps more active even, and he cuddled on my legs every night as is his wont. He was eating fine, drinking normally and, I'm sorry to say, using the box with prodigious efficiency, leaving clumps behind that appeared to be blood free. Something was definitely bothering him about his backside, though. We had broken an unfortunate amount of Christmas ornaments this year, the downsides of letting a toddler help decorate, and I had found slivers of sharp things in my feet so perhaps Fuzzy had done the same, yet nothing seemed to rankle him at the touch. Whether I examined his feet or tail or even squeezed his kidneys, poorly aping what I had seen vets do, he would just nuzzle into the examination and purr. Then I found something that I wasn't expecting when I looked more closely around the base of his tail; a menstruating vagina.
When we were given Fuzz, we were told she was a boy and we had no cause to doubt that. The people who gave us Fuzz owned an acreage, clearly they had the ability to look at the business end of an animal and determine its sex. Besides, how often do you look at your pet's genitalia? We just assumed she was a boy. In another unforeseen wrinkle of the pandemic, since we got Fuzz in April, she's been to the veterinarian a number of times, for preliminary shots and so-forth, but she was always delivered into the examination room by an assistant who collected her from our car in the parking lot. It's possible that we would have had this sorted out if we were in the exam room with the doctor but as we were handing her off out of the cracked window we didn't think to ask "And look for a cock while you're at it, will you?" The vets were likely working on what they knew to be a girl cat and then handing her back to a family to believed she was a boy.
It's quite a thing to believe you are raising a boy only to find out she's a girl and not only that but one that has blossomed into a woman. Strictly speaking, Fuzz—we are currently debating on whether or not to rename her—is not menstruating but is going through estrus, a phenomena that is medically separate from the menstrual period of a human. The etymology of the term "in heat," commonly applied to animals during estrus is hard to pin down definitively but it appears to come from the fact that many farm animals go into estrus, and therefore mating season, during the spring and summer months so the phrase refers to the literal heat of the weather. Cats have irregular, aseasonal estrus cycles because cats do whatever they damn please whenever it damn pleases them.
The word estrus itself is from the ancient Greek for "frenzy," referring to the sexual frenzy that an animal, besotted by fertility during the cycle, is subject to. Cats in heat are known to make mad dashes for the door in an attempt at freedom and the male companionship it offers, they are also famous for hollering throughout the night in a bid to attract dudes. Blessedly, we have been spared these symptoms but, then, we didn't raise our cat daughter to be a thirsty bitch. Of course, up until a few weeks ago we weren't raising her to be a bitch at all, thirsty or otherwise, so who knows where she came across her demurity.
I realize this is totally ridiculous but the episode has made think a bit about how gender informs the way we see the world. Fuzz obviously did not switch from being a boy to a girl, she was, in the parlance of the day, misgendered by a couple of clueless humans who never bothered to look up her skirt. And now that I know she's female, I don't think any different about her, why would I? Also, soon she'll be spayed (just as she was going to be neutered once upon a time) and at that point, the distinction is negligible. I know that cats don't have societies and their breeding is done simply to fulfill an evolutionary demand to pass on their genes and whatever capacity they have for love, for each other or for members of other species, is a kind of friendship, not romance. But why do I care so little about the gender of my cat when it is so central to how I see other people?
I joked earlier that we didn't raise the cat to be a certain way but what would gendered pet rearing even look like? I don't really "raise" the cat at all, I simply provide it with food, love and warmth and hope for the best. I know that relationships with people require a little bit more than that but I'm not totally convinced if those relationships are better for it. A few weeks ago I wrote about my responsibilities to my children but don't they ultimately come down to those three things? I admit that I imagine raising my children differently based on their sex, but I can't articulate the intellectual basis for that. Why would Effie need anything different from Rocky outside of the fact that one is Effie and the other is Rocky? Fuzzy didn't need anything different the day before we knew she was a girl than she did the way afterwards, except perhaps some chocolate and a romantic comedy to take the edge off her time of the month. The rules of gender in society are being upended at the moment and I've been at times skeptical of the change as I am of just about any large-scale disruption but something about the simple, consequence-free discovery of Fuzz's situation has me thinking there is a lesson there about our hang-ups and anxieties about what separates boys and girls.
Of course, this is an imperfect, overly simple analogy. A neutered animal is practically sexless and the human condition of romantic love and sexual desire complicates our relationships for better or worse. But don't envy animals just because they only know friendship, simple as it may seem. It was Oscar Wilde who recognized that “Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.”