Speaking of parthenogenesis, I think Komodo dragons can do it too? Sadly, I don’t think they engage in mating-like behaviour between females the way mourning geckos do.
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Oh and just to make thinks exceedingly clear for everyone, one of my posts that was hidden for “Attacking other users” said this:
You do not get to demand that others also be okay with letting ourselves be misgendered. You can compromise all you want. It’s not going to stop them from targeting you, too, when they’ve decided you’ve crossed a line and are now Too Trans To Deserve Respect™.
“We can never throw enough people overboard to win approval from our enemies.”
-Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: making history from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman
Stop throwing me overboard by demanding I compromise on my identity and start actually sticking up for trans people.
Actually listen to what your trans and ally users or saying or stop pretending you care about us and our rights. If your response to this post is to further double down and defend blatant exorsexism, transmisia, tone policing, and victim blaming, you’ll be proving to everyone that iNaturalist’s “commitment” to inclusivity is just as shallow and performative as any other corporation’s.”
According to the cis staff members, telling a trans person who is being transmisic to stop literally speaking over you and slandering you and demanding that you allow yourself to be misgendered, telling this person to stop doing that is considered a personal attack.
But it’s perfectly fine for that person to continuously paint me as irrational and overemotional and purposefully misprepresent me asking “hey can you not misgender me” as demanding “everyone be perfect all the time” and literally telling me that I have to be okay with being misgendered.
This is the kind of thing that is now hard-coded into the rules of the site as being a bannable offense, and considered a personal attack. Defending yourself from blatant bigotry. Asking people not to be bigoted towards you.
This is the kind of stuff the staff’s “apology” is still continuing to defend.
They still literally consider defending yourself from bigotry and asking people not to be bigoted towards you a “personal attack against other users”, but the bigotry itself? No, that’s perfectly fine. Sarcasm: Nothing wrong with a little hate speech between users, amiright? /sarcasm. But God help you if you say “hey you need to stop that”
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Well, from what I’ve read, I feel the opposite. @astra_the_dragon pointed out that a person can listen and yet still disagree. Well, the flipside of that is that explaining a decision again and again does not make it the right decision. At the end of the day, whether we are talking about a nation-state, a corporation, an academy, or any other established institution, the default is for the institution to define itself as being always in the right. The constitution, charter, bylaws, or whatever, will be written in such a way as to define the writers and the institution they represent as being always in the right. And that is why many of us cannot believe that anything will ever really change.
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I just saw this in the news:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us/arkansas-transgender-care-ban.html
And here is the 80-page opinion:
https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/39/60/c0ca02924b6cb8443da60f6c1ce3/ruling.pdf
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Here’s that same article on the NYT without the payway lol
So there’s one bright spot in the news!
Oh and I don’t think the links were ever posted here, but here is where you can get a free PDF copy of Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinburg (She/zie/hir pronouns), the queer activist who wanted the updated 20th anniversary edition to be publicly available for free after hir death, and if you’re more of a physical book reader, there’s a link on hir website of where you can order a print copy at-cost from Lulu :)
If anyone is interested in reading hir essays on queer activism and gender, Someone has collected them all together on the web archive here, and you can either read them in your internet browser, or if you have an ereader app I think they went through the trouble of converting the PDF by hand into an accessible EPUB for anyone with low vision that needs to be able to adjust the font sizes or use text-to-speech.
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So anyway, anyone see the new episode of Star Trek? Specifically Strange New Worlds S2E2: Ad Astra Per Aspera. I’ll avoid spoilers, but I thought it was an amazing example of an old school, philosophically compelling, courtroom ep (in the style of The Drumhead or Measure of a Man) that really dug deep into exploring the systemic pressures that effect minority groups. Seriously like 9/10 episode and while not specially LGBTQ related, I think it definitely touches on themes some of y’all would vibe with.
Sure is! It works pretty well too, usually.
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I didn’t even know there was a star trek show currently running lol, but good to know. Sometimes Star Trek gets stuff 100% right, and sometimes…ugh lol…(I’m never going to recover from everyone telling me for years that TOS is THE most progressive feminist thing ever to exist ever and then watching it only to be repeatedly slammed in the face with misogynistic hate crimes and absurd levels of racism)
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The thing about classic trek is there is definitely a lot wrong with it by modern standards, and Gene Roddenberry was famously a massive horndog. And Rick Berman taking over in the 90s wasnt great because he was just aggressively terrible to women.
But.
For the time, there is a lot they got right, and there are episodes even from the original series, but especially TNG and DS9 that hold up incredibly well. And the new seasons do a generally great job on representation, though the quality isnt always perfect (s2 of picard was… not good)
If you watch no other trek though, Strange New Worlds is soooooo worth it
Edit: while not… perfect representation, the character of Jadzia Dax from DS9 is sometimes a surprisingly great character that is used to, at least, explore some trans-adjacent theme. Basically she is a Trill, a race that sometimes partners symbiotically with uh, a slug thing (look its weird just go with it.) The symbiotes live longer than their hosts so live many lives, and their hosts are connected to those past lives. Basically there are several characters which knew her in a previous life where she was a man, and the immediate acceptance at recognizing their friend is so heartwarming
I explained that terribly. This scene, just watch this scene LOL https://youtu.be/ED5V1KCqbpU
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I forgot to post the links to the projects so here they are:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/trans-naturalists
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/xenogender-naturalists
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/nonbinary-naturalists
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In an effort to keep this main thread open, we’ve relocated and closed a side conversation on biological sex since the discussion has run its course, and an increasing number of replies that were found to violate our guidelines were flagged or hidden.
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Thank you!
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The National Wildlife Federation blog just ran a series of posts on queer ecology.
Queer Ecology: Relationships to Nature
Queer Ecology: A Spectrum of Perspective
Queer Ecology: Identity and Field Research
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These are excellent!
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This thread is getting kind of hard to follow with all the conversations that get split off and locked and sometimes redirected back here. Would it be possible for this thread to have its own rules to prevent this? And maybe a list of resources/guides to explain things like the difference between biological sex and gender, different labels, etc.?
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Very cool, I’ll bookmark them to read them later!
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The problem is trolls aren’t going to care about rules etc, and they’re very good at couching their language in ways that don’t seem harmful unless you’re looking at it.
Honestly, the best thing is probably just to not engage and report anything suspect to the mods.
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I can sum up fast the salient things of importance: if you are a minority it’s often hard to talk to strangers about it. You did anyway, for science. Thank you so much for this post. 
OP alone: you have an open invitation to DM me for a wee chat anytime you are bored. Worst possible outcome: Oh no! Wht if we get on a bit too well? We will both get over that. 
Yes, i get your point, but back when forums were more of a thing I used to be in some where certain threads would have their own special rules. It didn’t necessarily dissuade trolls, but allowed mods to take action more effectively (as people would know from the start that this or that wasn’t allowed) and made things easier. I can see where you’re coming from, though, I’m not sure the staff here would really do that.
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