What a joy to be young again
Dog owner Jade Shutte was so fed up with paying what she believed to be high dog registration fees that she sent a message to Auckland Council saying her dog was now identifying as a cat. Shutte, who screenshot and posted her message on Facebook, argued that, because her mutt was identifying as a moggy, she would no longer have to pay registration fees. She also claimed that Lettie’s new-found status would exempt her from a law banning dogs from the beaches between the hours of 10am and 7pm.
Needless to say, this argument didn’t wash with Auckland Council’s animal management. It replied to Shutte’s species identity status adjustment with PR platitudes saying the $135 dog registration fee helped ensure that canines played a positive part in Auckland life.
Shutte was moved to change the species status of her dog because of the inequality in cat and dog ownership laws. In Auckland, cats can roam free and their owners don’t have to pay any registration.
Shutte’s tongue-in-cheek, dog-to-cat identity change has been the inspiration for me, formerly known as an old person, or a ‘‘melderly’’ (a cross between a middle-aged person and an elderly person), to come out and identify as a young person.
I know this means I will have to forfeit, by virtue of my previous advanced age and shabby outward appearance, my right to have a young person stand up and give me their seat on the bus. But as this has happened only twice in my public transport experience, I will now happily, as a young person (as I did in the past) give my seat up to melderlies and elderlies.
As a born-again young person, I will once again enjoy the admiring glances of the opposite sex, or any identifying sex, as my pulse races with imagined oestrogen and I am once again noticed and acknowledged.
I will no longer be invisible or, if visible, identified as chopped liver and unemployable, and can rest firm in the knowledge that I will never undergo change and have to enter the wonder years of menopause.
As a youth I will enjoy the planet I have taken for a ride in my previous gasguzzling motor decades as I walk and cycle the pathways, and swim in the few remaining unpolluted beaches that haven’t been congested with bobbing ocean plastics and coastally eroded by climate change.
Because I will be identifying as a stripling, there will be no 65 retirement age or SuperGold Card to look forward to. I will have no choice but to embrace an eye-wateringly expensive and irrelevant education system that will leave me penniless for the decades ahead, and will give no certainty of gainful employment.
I will live in a small apartment with floor-toceiling windows, which if I own, I will pay exorbitant body corporate fees and rates for, and if I rent, will take up the lion’s share of my wages so I will never be able to save and own a home. So tiny will be my apartment that it won’t be big enough to swing my registered cat in, and will be fondly referred to as the ‘‘morgue drawers’’.
However, I won’t notice the cramped downsides of any of this because I will be living a virtual existence, care of increasingly fast-changing technology that even I, as an identifying young person, will struggle to keep up with.
Fortunately, by then I will have segued into the next phase of my survival and, abandoning all traces of flesh and blood status-hood, will be identifying as an anthropomorphic robot, commonly known as synth.