Ardath Rekha

You should be, for Star is made of awesome. :D

LOL yes, people who refer to their long-time pets as "it" annoy me, in many situations. (Now, if it's a creature where you just can't tell and will never know, that's not as annoying, but even then I find that a lot of people will assign a gender to the pet in their mind.) There are other languages where the neuter pronoun isn't so dehumanizing, but in English, being an it is being a thing, with no more consciousness to you than a piano leg. And that frustrates me... but even more frustrating are the people who try to "correct" you when you refer to an animal as a "he" or "she." I keep wanting to tell them "piss off, the world I live in has a lot more people in it than yours."