I know this seems kind of random, but I really want to tell this story. And the reason I want to is because of all the crazy hate I’ve been seeing out there lately. The trans bathroom debate, the shooting in Orlando. Everything. But, before I do I have some other things to say that will all come together in the end.

There is way too much hate in this world, and even just earlier tonight I read and reblogged something trying to say that just because they don’t agree with homosexuality doesn’t mean they’re homophobic. Which is bullshit of course. As a mother, and as someone who has been around and helped raise children for literally my whole life, I know that those adorable little things are blank slates. They absorb some things in utero, like the sound of their mothers voice and the cadence of the language around them, but you actually have to actively TEACH them to hate. They come out screaming and crying, capable of feeling hunger, pain, heat, cold, comfort, and love. They don’t know how to hate. My oldest daughter is four and a half and the first time she even said the word hate was to tell me that hating people was wrong. And I was talking about a TV character.

I have done my very best so far, and continue to do my best, in raising my children to be good people. Anyone who has ever tried to potty train a toddler, or get them to share, knows how hard it can be to teach little people to do anything. And my children come from stubborn stock. But if I were to want them to hate anyone or anything I would have to work night and day, for years, to get it through their heads. I don’t know how people do it. Teaching them to love however, it takes less than a sentence.

My oldest, Andrea, is a very opinionated little girl. And she has only been exposed to hetero relationships in her personal life, it’s just the way the cards have fallen. I know people who are part of the LGBT community, just no one who is around us often enough for their sexuality to be obvious. However, she watches stuff with me and the first time she saw two boys kissing on TV she was confused, because in her world only Momma and Daddy kiss each other like that. So I explained what it meant to be gay/lesbian, and that love was love, and that was it. For a couple weeks after she would point out gay people on TV and randomly give me or her stuffed animals the same talk I gave her but once the newness of the information passed it just became a part of the world. The rule is that if people love each other, they kiss. The end.

And that brings me to the cats. I have one cat that followed me home almost nine years ago, and she is mine. But I have fed, taken in, and/or rehomed a few others over the past couple years. Then Dotsa found us, following food I was leaving out for a different cat who has since found a home with the next door neighbor. Dotsa is a black and white Manx. Andrea decided that out of all the cats who have come into our lives that this one was hers. She loves Dotsa, picked out it’s name and told me it was a girl. The thing is, Dotsa is biologically a boy. He’s been fixed so it wasn’t horribly obvious and I had no desire to poke around between his legs, so I just went with it. I figured it didn’t really matter as my female cat was also fixed and so I left it alone. I thought it was kind of funny, but chalked it up to my daughter being stubborn. But then my dad came down to visit [which oh boy is a story in and of itself but I digress] and after I told him about Dotsa he went a-pokin and clarified that yes indeed that cat is male. And my little girl tells us that Dotsa is girl no matter what and SHE just happens to have boy parts and, not in so many words because however smart she is she is only four, that we had to respect that. I told her that that was okay, that there are some people who are born as one gender but live as another, and she continues to call Dotsa a girl and corrects anyone who says different. I’ve tested it.

So my point is, if my preschooler can accept and tell others to accept a mtf transgender cat when she doesn’t even have the vocabulary for what that is, then all of you grown ass adults can get the fuck over yourselves and love each other. They’re not hurting you. I’m a hell of a lot more worried that someone will snatch her off the street or a teacher will molest her than I am a trans person might assault us in a bathroom. Because to use my daughters words “everybody pees and everybody poops”.