"Two sexes," they say. "Any others are unnatural"

MUSHROOMS: but we have 17,000 sexes. Whoops sorry just discovered another one. Make that 17,001.

"The female of the species," they proclaim, "is the one that carries the fetus to term. Males can't get pregnant. It's unnatural."

SEAHORSES: but our males do.

"It's so simple," they declare, a little nervously, "If you were born with a penis, you're a male. Boom."

SPOTTED HYENA: but our females have penises.

"If you were born with a vaginal canal, you're a girl," they scream. "If you weren't, you aren't. End of story."

TURTLES: but our males are. and they can even breathe through them.

"Biological sex can't be changed," they shriek, self-righteously."That's just science".

CLOWNFISH: but we do it all the time

"You can pretend to be a gender you weren't born as, they gasp, assuring themselves that surely this time they will emerge victorious, "animals can't just up and change their chromosomes. That's common sense."

BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS: but we can. explosive chromosomal macroevolution is literally a part of our lifecycle.

"But chromosomes determine biologi-"

BEARDED DRAGONS: ours are determined by the weather

"But the Bible says male and female he made th-"

BLUEHEADED WRASSE: all of us are born female

"But you can't just wake up one day and deci-"

GROUPER (MALE): we literally do.

"But gender isn't flui-"

GROUPER (MALE): sometimes we change back

"But you can't just pick what gender you're going to be on any given day!" They shriek, "It doesn't work that way!!"

GROUPER (FEMALE): ahem

@Lana

I wanted to make a comment like this:

"Gayness is unnatural," says only homophobic species to the 1500 known species that have gayness.

But I can't find a website that tells me how many species change sex (sequential hermaphrodites). So far, I found one that says 500 fish, but there's also shellfish, shrimp, one starfish, one eel, at least one sea snail...

And that doesn't include the species that don't change sex, but are male and female all the time (simultaneous hermaphrodites).

@Lana stop bringing science into this argument — it’s unnatural.
@mwyman the REAL argument against.
@Lana @mwyman Writing arguments using letters is unnatural. Debating is also unnatural. It's natural to find a bigger stick than your opponent and hit him over the head with it. /S

@Lana
Okay, look, you're either born with XX or XY chromosomes...

or just X...

or XXX...

or XXY...

or XXYY...

or XXXY...

or XXXX...

or XXXXY...

or...

@jargoggles @Lana

platypus: I've got 5 of each X and Y

birds: X and Y? I have Z and W. Males are ZZ and females are ZW. Sorta the opposite of humans that way.

@jargoggles @Lana

About a quarter of humans will eventually show up with mosaic chromosome variations - XX/XO or XY/XO - simply with age.

I know this because my cardiologists had me typed to rule out early loss-of-Y, because it is a risk factor for the progression of heart disease.

Otherwise nobody checks.

@Lana lets just make this required reading
@Lana I wonder how they classify angler fish after the male has fused with the female?
Or post-pregnancy chimerism in humans?
@Lana oh, I remembered another one: there are voles that have an X chromosome variation (called X') that overrides the Y, so they end up with X'Y female, XY male, XX female, and XX' female
@Lana Isn't the diversity of life on this planet an amazing and beautiful thing? I surely think it is!
@Lana "You can't just mix and match"

Cardinal:
@Lana Yes! Want to read a book that covers all this and more? Bitch by Lucy Cooke. 😁 https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/433914/bitch-by-cooke-lucy/9781804990919
Bitch

What does it mean to be female? Mother, carer, the weaker sex? Think again. Whether it's the female lemurs of Madagascar, dominating the males of their species both physically and politically, the female albatross couples, hooking up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii, or the murderous meerkat mothers of the Kalahari Desert, the bitches in BITCH overturn outdated binary expectations of bodies, brains, biology and behaviour. In her trailblazing new book, Lucy Cooke offers a timely look at how sexist bias polluted evolutionary biology and through her riotous cast of bad-ass female animals shows the scientific patriarchy what's what.

@Research_FTW @Lana Ooh, thanks. Just grabbed the audio book.
@Lana I like to think that although I didn't, couldn't, and had a difficult time concentrating when I was at school...at least I remember them telling us in 3rd year Biology that some animals change their sex in the course of their life...
@Lana Snails would like to have a word. Exactly one.
@Lana Makes me wonder. Could it be that species get ‘trapped’ into a local optimum regarding gender and sex, possibly because ‘brains’ consume so much energy, everything else that ‘works for now’ stops evolving or is simply disabled? (The BBC article mentioned in this thread shows that we still have the genetic capabilities to change sex at a later stage)
@Dave_von_S @Lana It's not completely unlikely. E.g., some subspecies of groupers "lost" the ability to sex change which is linked to bigger territories with less likelihood of "not enough males/females" and allowed for bigger testes in the males.
@Lana I want to be Grouper.
@Lana

German rap artist #Sookee made a lovely song about "Queer Animals" (original: Queere Tiere) that's worth to mention in this context.
I hope you like it. 🏳️‍🌈✌️

Translation:
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/queere-tiere-queer-animals.html

YT Video clip
https://youtube.com/watch?v=E1zaKaP6i4o

Website:
https://sookee.de/
Sookee - Queere Tiere (English translation)

Sookee - Queere Tiere lyrics (German) + English translation: They say it'

@Lana thanks for this - it really made me chuckle.
@Lana
Y'all overlooked the preying #Evangenitals❗️☹️
@Lana
It s all about the Dogma. Yes, with a capital.
The president of the US can say there are only 2 sexes but that is his dogma.
People do have dogma's and they should have more points of view.

@Lana All this and all the variation in Humans ourselves.

As for the Bible? Ask nearly any Rabbi and they’ll tell you that Adam was not created male, but without gender. It wasn’t until after Adam couldn’t find a mate among the other animals that the ‘female’ aspects were separated to form Eve. Of course the Evangelicals won’t care about that.

@JamesPadraicR Jewish rabbinical texts support at least 6 genders and have for centuries.
@Lana Yep, but that’s Talmud, not Bible. Not many Evangelicals recognize anything other than the new testament.

@JamesPadraicR @Lana
The whole "thou shall not..." thing is in the old testament.

Where as "thou shall treat your neighbours (including Mexicans and Canadians) as thyself" is the new testament.

@leeloo @Lana
That’s Leviticus 19:18, Jebus was quoting Torah.

@JamesPadraicR @Lana

They'll totally quote parts of Leviticus when it matches what they want it to say and ignore the rest of it.

@Lana Rightwing minds are confused and enraged by complexity. Instead of trying to understand, they try to destroy. But the world is complex, and they will not have their perfect simplicity unless they destroy the world.
Huck and Jim talking about the language the French speak.

@Lana 425 years ago, a bright Italian man was burned alive for claiming that the universe does not revolve around us.

I really wish I could say that 425 years later, things have changed for the better.

However...

@Lana Religion denies you can change sex? ARE YOU DENYING THAT LOKI WAS ABLE TO MOTHER CHILDREN?
@Lana
Sponges are both genders simultaneously.
@Lana you don't even need to go that far, there are humans with XX chromosome that are assigned male at birth (mostly but not always due to the SRY gene sneaking into one of the X chromosomes), and humans assigned female at birth despite having XY chromosomes. And that's not even going into mosaicism or abnormal number of chromosomes.
And if you sum everything those cases are not even that rare.
@Lana Interresting, but gender is social, not natural. In responding on their ground statements, you make them win.

@Lana
*reading all of this*

Ahhhh...! Gender is a colour wheel!

@Lana and even if it all was unnatural ... so is society, money, healthcare, work, capitalism, countries, cars, social media, media in general, and climate change and I don't see these people caring about these things all that much.

@Lana

Just look into the #Nature - There are more #Sexes, than meets the Eye. I don't let the #World be #described to me/us by total #Idiots. #Trump anf his #GoonSquad are #Flatearthers !!