HMMMM

[ormery]

My family has a pet tortoise. She's somewhere in the region of sixty years old, and when we acquired her when I was about three or four her name was Dougal. A perusal of reference books on tortoise keeping led us to the assumption that this tortoise was in fact female, so her name was changed to Tabitha (I was big on alliteration when I was small)

Comments

[r_amythest]

I dunno if I would absolutely deny animals gender identity on the sheer basis of level of intelligence. There's no good way to really know their experience, or if gender identity is something that follows from thought rather than consciousness or whatnot.

That said, I'd say there's no difference in what you call them because they can't understand English. In the case of a turtle, you can project whatever gender you want onto it and it probably won't care.

A similar incident happened with the turtle my AP Bio teacher had in the room. They named the turtle Franklin. Then it laid eggs. The name was retained, but most people preferred to abbreviate it to "Frankie." I don't think people give an ass about retaining wrong-gender names for pets a lot of the time but they do tend to switch around the pronouns.

Anyway I think the argument about using particular pronouns for an animal is kind of mixed, because on the other hand if you think about it you could've interpreted it as the first family knowing that Doug really identifies male and you pushed female on him because of sex and Doug was never really cool with Tabitha and now he is relieved that you guys are getting it right again but your insistence to call him Tabitha is like peoples' insistence on using the same name/pronouns for a post-closet transperson because they're used to it?

I just think there's too many ways to spin it to be worth analyzing.