My Dear Friend Just Joined Tumblr And I Was Scrolling Through Terf Tags So That They Can, Yknow, Have

That thing about how cats think humans are big kittens is a myth, y’know.

It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.

The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats - but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.

It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true - but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.

The like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates - it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.

They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need - it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.

They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.

It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.

Basically, you’re going to have a much easier time getting a handle on why your cat does why your cat does if you remember that the natural mode of social organisation for cats is not as isolated solitary hunters, but as a big communal catpile - and for that purpose, you count as a cat.

so take a breath and dance with death, my love cannot be turned.

“humans don’t do anything for free” somewhere out there there is a guy who spent days if not weeks of his life cataloguing every stupid thing you can do on stardew valley so that you can minmax the fuck out of growing potatoes on a pixel grid for quite literally no reason but that it might help someone else

but yeah. "what about the hostages" right? uh-huh.

from Sarahofmagdalene, 11/Mar/2024:

""You cannot piss in a cup or pull a sword from a stone or anything else in order to tell if you're trans or not. You are if you want to be. You're not if you don't."

This is what I say. No one listens.

"Look. I define transgendered literally; it's a way of crossing. Crossing into a different gender. Not the opposite, there are so many, just a different one. Or crossing out of the gender that theoretically goes, in that there heterosexual matrix we keep talking about, with your biological sex.

"Being a transsexual is a different animal. That's a matter of medical things or the intention of medical things, changing your sex you know? The sex parts: genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, secondary sexual characteristics. Or living full-time as a person of a certain culturally aligned sex and gender, whether you do medical things or not, because some people can't and it isn't fair to punish that. So them, too. But transgendered is wide open. And butch is a nonnormative gender yes? We can agree on that, anyway? So if you want to claim transgendered, great as far as I'm concerned."

People sign at me. They roll their eyes, They shake their heads. They want me to make ruling, they want me to tell them if they can call themselves transgendered, or alternative if they can still call themselves butch. As though I somehow have the power to confer or deny whatever label they want, or as though I can be relied upon to make an impartial decision int he case of an argument, whether it is internal or among individuals."

"Border Wars” Butch is a Noun essays by S. Bear Bergman (2006)

it’s december 1 where’s the christmas tail kitten bring him to me

if you're ok with an incessant amount of boops reblog this so I can get those other 2 badges <3