It's so funny to me that it's possible to have verbal misunderstandings with animals.

This morning I made Ripley (a parrot) a foraging toy, as I often do before I leave for work, by putting a bunch of paper shreds in an old tea box with some peanuts and dried cherries. He hadn't touched it by the time I came home so when he was wandering around the living room restlessly looking for something to do I picked up the box and told him "hey, there's a peanut in here. You can get it out" and then I went back to my office.

After a couple minutes, he walked through the kitchen to where I was sitting at my desk and looked up at me and whispered "I get peanut?"

I said, "Buddy. I think you misunderstood me. The peanut is still in the box."

He tapped his beak on the floor, said "oh" in a really disappointed tone, and then helpfully suggested, "I step up get a peanut?"

Like, yes, he is really smart and I think he understood a lot of this interaction. But the way I think he understood it was he heard me say:
"Hey, there's a peanut in here. You can get it out."

And then disregarded the box entirely. So that when he walked into my office expecting to receive a peanut and I told him it was still in the box, he inferred from my tone of voice that I did not, in fact, have a peanut in my hands. Then he tried to engineer a scenario in which he might receive a peanut as a reward.

(He regularly attempts to use "I step up get a peanut" as a deescalation/distraction tactic, especially when he is doing something Forbidden, such as destroying the couch. My housemates and I refer to this as "holding the couch hostage" or "negotiating with the terrorist.")

she took the midnight train going anywhere

people b saying things so definitively. like man i think it depends

interesting observation i've made: i'm a genderqueer intersex trans person who's been on T for 9 years. i wear a lot of elaborate makeup and dress in "women's" clothing most of the time. my body is very masculine and i don't hide my "masc" features like my facial and body hair when i go out, i don't try to pass as any given binary gender, i did in the past and it made me miserable, so i just go about my life as the genderqueer person that i am

whenever i'm outside in a skirt or dress and my beard and body hair are fully visible, i do get a lot of compliments from fem people and women, but i actually get a very large portion of my comments from masc people and men. i originally thought that men would be the most hesitant, but i actually get a lot of men who approach me saying things like "i really dig what you're doing" or "keep that up" or even things like "you dress like how i feel on the inside." that one really stuck with me.

if this many men and mascs are willing to approach me- how many more feel the same way and were too shy or scared to say it out loud for fear of judgment from those who may overhear?

we societally groom men and AMAB people to believe they don't want to wear dresses, skirts, and makeup- but they do. whether or not these people were all transfem eggs or gay is not for me to speculate on; what i want people to take away from this is that people of all gender identities want to wear dresses, skirts, and makeup. people of all gender identities want to dress in different ways. we teach each other that women only wear certain clothes and men only wear certain other clothes, but that's just not the reality of it.

people are way more nuanced than that, and i've seen it with my own two eyes. it's beautiful. the world is a lot more open minded than we're taught to believe. we need to start letting everyone dress as they please. it's clear that most people don't fit into this rigid binary we've created. humanity is just too diverse for that.