A woman has made the decision to raise her gats as gender-neutral to practice the correct use of pronouns in real life scenarios.

Writing in the Washington Post, Lauren R. Taylor describes how she accidentally called her two female cats "boys" and decided to use her mistake to start regularly using "gender-neutral language for the humans in my life".

"That’s when I decided to raise my cats to be gender neutral," she writes.

"The cats’ lives wouldn’t change, I reasoned, and it would help me learn to use plural pronouns for my friends, neighbours and colleagues who individually go by they, their and them."

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She adds: "Even though using they, them and their as singular pronouns grates on many people because it’s grammatically incorrect, it seems to be the most popular solution to the question of how to identify people without requiring them to conform to the gender binary of female and male.

"It also just feels right to refer to people as they wish to be referred to."

She said she "began to get an infinitesimal taste of what transgender and gender-nonconforming people face.

"I’m not talking about the outright bigotry and hatred - something I can’t know without being in their shoes - but the complete cluelessness."

She concluded: "It is confusing. We’ve had gender drilled into us as part of language since we first heard adults talking when we were infants - decades of 'he' and 'she'."

"But at the same time it’s necessary. People are coming to understand that not all of us fit into the “girl” box or the “boy” box.

"Those who don’t are claiming space to be who they are. We all need to find ways to acknowledge and respect that.