Genderless in the wild
Meet the first gender neutral penguin at aquarium Sea Life London.
Staff have decided not to describe the Gentoo penguin as male or female because they say gender is more of a human construct. Expert Aquarists say it would be normal for it to grow up as genderless in the wild as male and female penguins look almost the same until they mature and reach adulthood.
Not almost the same, just plain the same. Lots of birds are not visibly dimorphic at all and nobody knows what sex they are. That’s nothing to do with “gender neutral” though, it just means the sex is unknown. Animals don’t have “genders.” Of course gender is a human construct, but that’s not a reason to call animals “gender neutral.” If you don’t know the sex you don’t know the sex, and gender doesn’t come into it.
Graham McGrath, General Manager at Sea Life London, said: ‘While the decision may ruffle a few feathers, gender neutrality in humans has only recently become a widespread topic of conversation, however, it is completely natural for penguins to develop genderless identities as they grow into mature adults.’
They don’t develop “genderless identities”! They don’t develop any kind of identities. They get older. If they mate, they mate. Some males mate and leave, others stay and help rear the young. None of that is a matter of “gender,” much less animals that are “gender neutral.” They don’t argue over who gets to wear the high heels tonight, either.
What frickin’ hogwash. The penguins know very well what sex they are and the sex of their mates.
So… when penguins reproduce it’s just a happy accident?
This really is idiotic.
Why is it so hard to accept that sex is an actual biological thing?
That last line, though! Never have I heard such a blatant display of biological determinism!
“ … it may become part of this breeding program depending on the gender its biology determines.”
Also, they spell program[me] two different ways in that article.
I could understand the zoo staff refusing to talk about penguins being “masculine” or “feminine” — perhaps rebelling against an ad campaign where Polly Penguin wears a little dress and talks about how hard it is to find shopping malls at the South Pole — but wouldn’t equating sex with gender just promote this problem? “We can’t say this penguin is female because it doesn’t wear little dresses.”
It’s getting very confusing.
So this means they’ll stop putting a pink hair bow on the girl penguins now?
What the fuck is a zoo doing conflating sex with gender??
I would have thought that zoos would need to have a list of girls and boys, breeding programmes being central to their mission, these days.
Strange that the elephants and rhinos and giraffes and other things with great swinging members aren’t gender neutral, only the penguins.
What about meercats? As far as I know, no bugger can tell the males and females apart other than the alpha pair and that’s largely because of how bitey they are. Are the non-alphas gender neutral even though they’re all secretly having it away with each other when they think nobody’s looking?
What about starfish? You have to look pretty close to tell the males and females apart and while I could do it in theory, practice might prove otherwise. Are they genderless too? Or non-binary? Or non-quinary?
In a world where we seem likely to run out of penguins fairly soon, I advocate knowing what sex the ones that live in zoos are so that we can have some spares.
Next up: Gender neutral bacteria!
They’re sexed, not gendered. I mean, they’re all wearing tuxedos!
YEAH! Gender neutral bacteria… are… wait a minute…
Anyway, cake! https://static.wixstatic.com/media/2a0991_f8708c8baf156f0b559a29604e0b9b19.jpg_srz_745_742_85_22_0.50_1.20_0.00_jpg_srz
From the point of view of the male Emperor penguin, watching his mate trundle off into the gloom to eat for a few months while he sits on the dang egg, transitioning probably would seem to be a pretty good idea.
People have always had trouble telling male and female penguins apart, but now suddenly this Bird of Not-Yet-Determined Sex is the “first” gender neutral penguin. They asked the penguin, did they?
And while they were asking, they should have kept in mind the old joke: “How do you tell if a [penguin] is a girl or a boy? Ask it a question. If he answers, it’s a boy; if she answers, it’s a girl.” Although maybe that makes pronouns carry too much weight.
One of my few skills is sexing British water fowl.
It’s all in the JIZZ.
(JIZZ = General Impression, size and shape).
I know it doesn’t fit the acronym, but I can sex a goose from 200m. With JIZZ, can you?
Virtually every animal in the wilderness is genderless in the sense that no one has personally examined them with an to determining their sex, and those that are seen at all are mostly seen by people that don’t know enough / care enough to sex them. This penguin is late to the party.
There are dozens of news articles a year about gay penguins. Are penguin keepers just inept at sexing their charges or are penguins just gayer than most birds? Or are penguins inept at sexing each other?
I have fond memories of the No Toad Sexing signs in hidden places around campus.
https://everything2.com/title/No+Toad+Sexing
Ha! What a lovely story.
The goodest good boy of them all, Lassie, was always played by a female. Does this mean that Lassie was trans?
Lassie was playing a female dog. Usually played by a male. Why? Who knows. Maybe because female dogs are bitches? ;-)
@Acolyte of Sagan:
Lassie was a good girl. She was played by male dogs, who had better coats.
I think you might just have been violent, there, somehow.
Ah, but which restroom did Lassie use? The male fire hydrant? Or the female?
Of course the reality is, only male dogs can do that because only they have the external hose. IT IS SO UNFAIR.
Aren’t meerkats female dominated? Making female meerkats trans meertoms, or something?
Ahem. My female chihuahua cocked her leg to pee very often while on walks… when she wasn’t doing handstands to pee as high as she could on a tree trunk.
Clearly non-binary at the minimum.
Well, I’ll be damned! That false memory thing is real. Lassie was indeed a male playing a female, yet even though I know that to be correct (thanks to all for the correction), I can still ‘remember’ little Timmy shouting ‘Lassie. Here, boy.’ I have always known that Timmy never did fall into the well, mind, which is probably the most commonly stated Lassie plotline-that-never-was.
It certainly makes more sense for Lassie to be played by a male dog, or more accurately a series of males, and I can offer a couple of explanations to iknklast’s question at #20. First, and probably the main reason is size. There is a tendency for the larger dog breeds to display a greater degree of sexual dimorphism, and the Rough collie (aka Shetland sheepdog or Sheltie) is a large breed comparable to German Shepherds, with the females typically being considerably smaller than the males. The larger the dog on screen, the more believable the stunts and feats of strength will be. Second, as Sastra eluded to, is the coat. In long-coated breeds the females shed a lot more hair than males, so the males tend to have a fuller coat which adds to the impression of size and is more aesthetically pleasing on film.
@Lady M:
I don’t think so. at least not when it comes to breeding. I think they have an alpha pair who do most of the breeding but the alpha male is not too gentle about choosing his alpha female. Which makes meerkats 17th century trans royals, I guess. Also 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st.
iknklast @#8: evolving beyond single cells could have been the biggest mistake our bacterial ancestors ever made.