Part of Me calls animals “it” because it’s kinda messed up to force human constructs of gender on them. I always try to put in effort to call babies “it” until they’re old enough to state their pronoun preference. But with animals, I don’t think the “it” pronouns are as important, because they don’t understand. So there’s a much bigger part of Me that’s willing to gender animals than babies.
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Papanca@lemmy.world 2 days ago
To add to the comments; many people and laws still view animals as objects, to do with as one pleases. I still here americans -i’m from europe- talking about animals as ‘it’.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 days ago
a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
Why not use “they”? Its gender neutral without being objectifying
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 19 hours ago
Because the talking animals I know tend to prefer “it”. The ones who were unfortunately born in human bodies, I mean.
And because singular “they” implies personhood, and I don’t want to project personhood onto animals. Instead, I want us to decouple our ethics from personhood and treat non-persons with some level of equality with persons. You shouldn’t need to be a person in order to have rights. Calling animals people just reifies the supremacy of persons, and causes more issues down the line when it comes to the questions of non-persons who aren’t animals, and their rights. Like aliens and AIs.
a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.ca 19 hours ago
Because the talking animals I know tend to prefer “it”. The ones who were unfortunately born in human bodies, I mean.
If they can talk, they have a human mind. And apparently they have a human body. Idk man kinda just sounds like you’re talking to humans to me
remon@ani.social 2 days ago
Same in Europe though. In fact “it” is just the proper pronoun for a lot of animals in gendered European languages.