I remember being a tween in the mid/late 90s and trying to convince why Mormon friends why I believed being trans was real and possible, not that I especially understood what trans was. I figured if nature was so varied and had so many irregularities there was no reason that being born into the wrong body/the wrong sex couldn’t be one of those irregularities. Being this was the 90s and the topic hadn’t been politicized we all came to the conclusion it was reasonable for biology to “allow for” trans identities. I feel like even basic biology covered the concept of a person being trans just fine
Slap 'em with the thing that says mushrooms have like 28 thousand genders and develop new ones all the time.
TIL.
[T]he fungi can mate with nearly every individual of their species they meet. […] 23,000 different sexual identities, a result of widespread differentiation in the genetic locations that govern its sexual behavior.
Why is it useful to call them sexual identities then? Are exact matches not able to mate?
“sexual identities” lmao way to anthropomorphize freaking mushrooms 🤣
They’re called mating types and are not at all comparable to the aforementioned, entirely human, concept
fungi: “I didn’t see you all the way over there.”
Why is this snail yellow? For me all snails are brownish.
It’s a banana slug. Fiat Slug!
fascinating, their yellow color makes them more interesting for me. Are they all yellow or just some individuals?
They are generalist feeders, though they exhibit a preference for certain mushrooms.
slugs will eat carrion if given the chances.
Yeah I’ve seen 'em eating dead slugs
hence why slugs, snails, aquatic and land ones carry a ton of parasites, they eat each others slime or feces. parasites love to use gastropods and decapods(crustaceans( as secondary hosts,
Most are yellow but they can be more tannish, white, or brown. Pacific banana slugs also often have black or dark brown spots (they look like overripe bananas) that can cover their entire body to make them black. Pacific banana slugs are usually less bright than California banana slugs too. The yellow is likely warning colouration: their slime has an anesthetic that numbs the tongue.
It’s a banana for scale
Humans are not slugs.
Speak for yourself
*basic Human biology
But it’s not, though. It’s the watered down children’s version of biology people half remember from elementary school. It’s not actual human biology.
Invoking snail biology is still a non-sequitur, regardless of the actual truth value of the initial statement
It is in one sense and isn’t in another. Someone saying “basic biology” is generally ignorant of the wide world of biology out there, either through lack of exposure or purposefully so.
The truth is that biology’s definitions are all humans’ ways of dividing up phenomena into neat little categories, but nature just exists as it is and doesn’t need to follow our linguistic rules.
For every definition we come up with, there are invariably multiple exceptions that don’t cleanly fit, because that’s just not how nature works. Even basic definitions like “sex,” “species,” and “life” itself start to get shaky the moment we try to eliminate all the exceptions.
The truth is that for humans there is no single, universally accepted definition of sex or gender. And even attempts to reduce them to something tangentially related like genotype quickly fall apart when you start looking at the exceptions. The person who says that there being two human sexes (usually to the exclusion of gender identity) is “basic biology” is not only categorically wrong, but they’re either ignorant of or ignoring the granularity of our own species. The whole of human sex and gender identity cannot be neatly summed up as “Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina” from Kindergarten Cop.
So are the slugs relevant? I would say yes, because if you’re not aware of the variation in nature on the obvious macro scale you have no prayer of appreciating it on the more subtle micro scale.
