Neat boxes
Et tu Natural History Museum?
https://twitter.com/NHM_London/status/1140263163247636480
Joan was assigned Jonathan at birth.
Tip Jar
Et tu Natural History Museum?
https://twitter.com/NHM_London/status/1140263163247636480
Joan was assigned Jonathan at birth.
I’m sure they’ll say something stupid about male Emperor penguins sitting on eggs or similar…
You *might* have some of the brighter animals caring about something like gender but I doubt some rando can find much evidence for it…
Well, they’re not actually wrong, as such. There are indeed many examples of complex sex (not gender!) biology seen in nature. There is hermaphrodism, parthogenesis, males that are absorbed into the body of their mates, creatures that change biological sex roles according to environmental factors etc . What’s being ignored here is that you have to bounce back down the tree of life to at least class level before you can climb back up a different branch and find the species for which this is usual.
Mammalian species are, as far as I’m aware, all sexually dimorphic to a greater or lesser degree. Di. Two. And yes, you can find examples of developmental pathways going awry in most species that we’ve studied in any depth (ditto same sex sexual behaviour, for that matter). When that happens we get varying forms of intersex conditions. Which has absolutely zero to do with gender behaviour as conceived of by current fashions.
I know someone with an intersex condition (woman with Turner’s Syndrom – sex chromosomes XO). She tells me the intersex community get really pissed off by the way trans theorists have coopted intersex terminology – like AFAB and AMAB. Seems like in any other group, that would be called out as cultural appropriation.
I didn’t mean to imply that they’re wrong, just that I suspect they’re trying to tell us something more than that there are many examples of complex sex biology seen in nature. By “suspect” I mean “can tell.”
And yet another parallel with religion. Eyes are complex, therefore God: Intersex kangaroo exists, therefore men are women.
So we used to (or still) project heteronprmative behaviour in our studies of other species. Good to set that restrictive filtration aside. But now we’re going to go into nature in search of queerness, or gender fluidity/maleability/whatever and attempt to project that back onto human behaviour? Have they found any other species that records itself masturbating while wearing rubber fetish gear yet?
And yes, let’s see how many males sign up to be absorbed into their female mate’s body to become a parasitic attachment like in the anglerfish. (Mind you, there are probably plenty who have the “parasitic” part going already.) Not all variations are going to be equally applicable in the human realm. I think many women would do well to imitate the praying mantis or Black Widow myself….
My apologies for heteroning your prmatives. That was supposed to be “heteronormative.”
Need more covefe.
Or less, maybe.
Gender in nature? As in, gender outside the human species? Like what, do seahorses have pronoun preferences now? Is that how we determined it’s the male of the species that carries the eggs to term? By asking them in seahorsese?
No. Fuck this bullshit. I require empirical evidence that any animal, or other living thing besides humans, possess genders.
Feminists pointed this out for YEARS. Their point was, “Being female is a biological state. Human cultural ideas about what females are like are culture-bound, blinkered, and sexist.”
Everyone Else: Yawn. Get back to the kitchen.
Trans activists: “Ooh, look! Male seahorses gestate baby seahorses! TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN!”
Everyone Else: Ooh! Tell us more!
listen to the man in the room.
#10, I’d rather listen to the nan in the room.
@Ophelia #3 – Ooos, sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest you were rejecting the basic facts! I was going for exactly what you said: these facts are “true” (in as far as anything can be “true” in science) but they are utterly irelevant to human biology. There’s separate evolutionary pathways that go back hundreds of millons of years before you get to the LCA we share with creatures who have these abilities.
My rhetorical flourish obviously fell flat!
Not flat at all! Great comment. I don’t remember why I bothered to make that stupidly literal “clarification.”