If we’re being pedantic fungi have neither gender nor sex, they have “mating types”. But yeah, mating types are more analogous to sexes than genders. Fungi would have to have some level of social experience to have gender.
I reworded my comment a few times to try to hedge for that, without making any claims about fungi experiences because I couldn’t know anything about that.
It’s certainly possible fungi experience some abstract form of social life, but I think it’s unlikely they have an experience of gender at all analogous to ours.
Humans have more than 2 sexes. Sex is a convenient category based around a phenotype, not a golden rule that all organisms adhere to. People who exist outside those phenotypes are not defective or malformed and do not necessarily require surgeries to ‘correct’ their bodies and make them fall in line with binary sex categories.
The reason that science has been able to assert that sex is binary is by excluding all organisms that exist outside those phenotypes. Its a problem when those organisms are people, as you are functionally erasing their existence or at the least handwaving it away as irrelevant. This is one of the many vectors along which intersex people experience discrimination.
By asserting sex as binary and immutable you are actually doing the legwork of transphobia for transphobes. They also assert that sex is binary and immutable. They deny that any such thing as gender identity or expression exists in the first place, instead asserting that gendered behavior is a direct product of biology.
I am not a ‘male woman’, to even try and state that is to deny my own biology and experience. It is transphobia.
Since I don’t think fungi have a social structure, those are sexes.
Humans have two Sexes but also gender expression, conflating those is how transphobes come to their views.
If we’re being pedantic fungi have neither gender nor sex, they have “mating types”. But yeah, mating types are more analogous to sexes than genders. Fungi would have to have some level of social experience to have gender.
its usually a denoted + OR - for mating pairs.
To be fair, do we know for certain that fungi do not experience some form of social life?
It may not be human sapience but the mycelium networks hint at some forms of communicating information.
I reworded my comment a few times to try to hedge for that, without making any claims about fungi experiences because I couldn’t know anything about that.
It’s certainly possible fungi experience some abstract form of social life, but I think it’s unlikely they have an experience of gender at all analogous to ours.
Humans have more than 2 sexes. Sex is a convenient category based around a phenotype, not a golden rule that all organisms adhere to. People who exist outside those phenotypes are not defective or malformed and do not necessarily require surgeries to ‘correct’ their bodies and make them fall in line with binary sex categories.
The reason that science has been able to assert that sex is binary is by excluding all organisms that exist outside those phenotypes. Its a problem when those organisms are people, as you are functionally erasing their existence or at the least handwaving it away as irrelevant. This is one of the many vectors along which intersex people experience discrimination.
By asserting sex as binary and immutable you are actually doing the legwork of transphobia for transphobes. They also assert that sex is binary and immutable. They deny that any such thing as gender identity or expression exists in the first place, instead asserting that gendered behavior is a direct product of biology.
I am not a ‘male woman’, to even try and state that is to deny my own biology and experience. It is transphobia.
Quality rant, thanks for the on point wording!