If you've ever owned a dog, or shared your home with cats (bearing in mind that cats, being cats, can't be owned,) especially if the animals have come from a few different breeds, you'll have noticed that how some behaviours are common to some breeds. Most dogs will fetch you things, as will cats, though they mostly fetch things you don't want fetched.
Like half a mouse.
Labradors eat so fast their food is gone before they know what it was, terriers are grazers, many breeds of spaniel naturally quest, Siamese cats tend to be noisy and destructive, Burmese are affectionate, Persians are plain hard to please and so on.
Dogs are much more trainable than cats, but some breeds are more trainable than others and within breeds some dogs learn faster. I've lost count of the times I've accidentally trained a dog something, but I've also marvelled at how much some dogs value routine to the point of being OCD, while others are laid back to the point of horizontal.
One time we owned two sisters, one of whom knew the time her walks should happen to the minute, the other of whom hated walks with a passion, because she took an instant dislike to all other dogs but her sib. The second was easily trainable, but a complete non-conformist, while the first was harder to train but vastly more confident than her sis. They both ate food like a speed run through a platform game and none of our friends could tell them apart when they sat together, yet the moment either dog moved, they could name her.
We had those two from six weeks old and we treated them just the same.
So it is with us. Some of how we are seems to be inherited, other elements of our personalities seem innate (as in we're born that way,) and yet another tranche are learned. It can be very hard to tell which element is nature and which is nurture.
The elements we learn are taught first by our parents, secondly by our wider families, then by people outside our family, like teachers and people we're at school with and finally by a third set of friends, partners and fellow workers in adult life.
We can't choose the first group, but we have to live by their rules, so their values take root in us the deepest, many of them before we're old enough to realise what's going on. Though we get to choose some of the second group, we still have to conform under the pressure of school rules and peer pressure, and because our brains are still maturing, this group's values remain influential throughout our lives too, though less so than the first.
Mixing with the third group can be revelatory, but when we first meet them, we still carry with us everything we've absorbed from the first two groups. If you can remember the first time you sat down with someone who challenged a firm assumption you held about some core value, what happened?
Your first reaction was probably it was bull, followed by a wave of 'hey, I'd never thought about it like that!' only for a few minutes, hours, or days later when you maybe began to realise something you intrinsically believed either wasn't right, or wasn't right for everybody.
The most powerful experience of this type I had was during my teens, with a 'second group' contact, my friend Ginny. My parents were conservative, as was my school, the men in the family highly masculine and everyone religious. On the one hand I was subjected to a drip feed of norms telling me not only that their way was normative, but also that any deviation from the path would lead to a sorry end, while on the other I lived a relationship which trampled on their rules and made me so happy I still warm at the memory all these decades later.
Yet, as I've written before, I'm a good act as a man. So how does this even compute?
I'm the human equivalent of a labrador. I'm confident, outgoing, enjoy fetching things, love being patted and an incurable optimist. Yet, just as dogs and cats are born with some characteristics true to their breed and others at variance, and just as two labs from the same litter and brought up together will share some traits and differ in others, so do I both share and differ from my family. That's what nature and nurture do to you in the complex process of growing up.
Because I'm fundamentally curious and like finding out how things work, I spent a lifetime acquiring the skills to take my mind apart, understand why I'm trans and deal with the bits of me that don't like it. I didn't want to change my trans-ness, because it brings me all kinds of good things. One thing that really surprised me during my unofficial, intermittent and often hilarious analysis was one of my motivations for going to medical school may have been it was the only place I could at that time find the tools I needed to begin digging. Which seems crazy, but in the context of me, not so crazy.
Where did this get me and what's it to do with cats and dogs?
In a society with different norms, my trans-ness would challenge no-one because it wouldn't trigger the zero-sum assumptions some groups are trying to bake in around gender identity. Just as we accept not all labradors fetch things, so we would accept not all men need to be masculine. For those people my comfort with feminine traits and gender expression is their discomfort, leading them to portray me as a threat when I'm not. As I watch their anxiety boiling over and the increasingly polarised positions activists on both sides are taking, I think of the reaction by men to women who aren't feminine, which is mostly one of acceptance.
If we could open up a dialogue between moderates on both sides in a situation where fear did not overwhelm the exchange, we could find a way out of this stand off and work toward a solution where both parties could have most of what they want. A political dogfight is not going to resolve this and given the lawyers haven't managed to adequately define biological sex yet (which we desperately need if we're to help people born intersex) or begin to consider non-binary people, then a dialogue between ordinary folk might not only be the best solution, but allow us to understand each other.
Who knows, we might even get to like each other?
