By: Daisy Stephens

Published: Jul 24, 2022

The Black Trowel Collective, a group of American archaeologists, claimed there are suggestions that many historical cultures had more than two genders and so archaeologists should be "wary of projecting our modern sex and gender identity categories onto past individuals".

The group claimed scientists have a "long history of imposing modern patriarchal gender and sexual norms onto the past".

"Human gender is highly variable and... human beings have historically been comfortable with a range of genders beyond modern 'masculine' and 'feminine' binaries," the group wrote in a blog post.

The Daily Mail claims that some academics are beginning to label ancient human skeletons as 'non-binary' or 'gender neutral'.

The idea has been criticised by historian Jeremy Black, who said gender is key to understanding history.

"It is an absurd proposition as the difference between genders, just as the difference between religious, social and national groups, are key motors in history," he told the Daily Mail.

"This very ideological approach to knowledge means that we're in danger of making knowledge itself simply a matter of political preference."

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Life continues to imitate parody. 🤡

"projecting our modern sex and gender identity categories onto past individuals"

Current gender woo is the invention and imposition of bored, modern first-world academic elites, which makes this absurdly ironic.

"we're in danger of making knowledge itself simply a matter of political preference."

This is literally the postmodern, social constructivist belief and objective.

No one ever needs to respond to this deranged ideology with anything other than "no."

saw your most recent post about really good fics that contain uncomfortable kinks and i immediately thought "ah, biscia must be reading the mpreg soriel fic" and almost left a reply talking about it but i stopped myself because i realized that would be an insane assumption to make. needless to say i felt so vindicated when i saw you link it in an earlier post.

like. HELLO?

HELLO???????

friendly reminder that the term “doctress” has been phased out by biologists after it was discovered in 2007 that doctors have only one biological sex and any apparent gender dimorphism is simply the result of random phenotype expression and is not linked to chromosome formation

Numerous interconnected elements must be factor in, such as the subtleties of actual physical differences between the sexes, the strength and acuity of animals' various perceptual abilities, different behaviors between males and females, the active participation of individuals "mistaken" for the opposite sex, and the intricacies that arise when transgender is layered over homosexuality.

"Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" - Bruce Bagemihl

I CACKLE at these trans teens calling themselves punks and marxists . They refuse to belive MATERIAL REALITY (biological sex and sexual dimorphism), believe one can LITERALLY PURCHASE (through makeup, surgery, etc) being a female, and crave EXTERNAL VALIDATION AND AFFIRMATION CONSTANTLY. i simply HAFF to LAFF

hi! i was wondering your opinions on how hrt affects the body? i hold a lot of radfem beliefs but i am trans (taking testosterone). would being a woman to you have to be completely about chromosomes? for example, trans men years on T do not have the same genetic makeup as cis women. same with trans women on E, their genetic makeup would be very different to cis men, and would more correlate to cis women. does this factor in who you consider female/male or having experience as women?

Hi there, thanks for reaching out.

Firstly, I think you may be a bit confused. Taking exogenous hormones does not affect your genetic makeup. Your dna will stay the same unless you're exposed to something extreme like radiation - this is a good thing because dna mutation is bad for you and causes cancer! Your genetic sex is immutable, a person with XY chromosomes cannot have their dna altered to have XX chromosomes instead.

Hormones will affect the expression of your genes, for example turning on facial hair production in women who are taking testosterone. This is why those patterns of facial hair, even in women, differ from person to person. The genes for it were already there, but hormone replacement therapy uses the endocrine system to change what signals get sent to your genes to tell them what features to express.

Beyond chemically induced genetic expression, there are particular physical features in males that do not occur in males, and vice versa. This is a feature of the /ancient/ evolution of sexual reproduction. Despite the variety of metaphysical beliefs about identity and personhood, the truth is that humans evolved to reproduce between two sexes, and human beings cannot change sex. Every cell of your body has your sex encoded within it. This affects us physically in many ways. I and most feminists believe that this fact should be irrelevant to any person's ability to pursue their passion, be themselves, and love who they love. Even so, recognition of biological sex is something important. This is really critical in a medical context. For example: men who receive a blood transfusion from a pregnant or recently pregnant woman have an increased risk of death by transfusion-related lung injury. Another example: tracheostomy tubes differ in size depending on sex due to dimorphism in average tracheal diameter. A women who is reported as a male risks considerable injury by having a male sized tracheostomy tube forced into her windpipe. A considerable amount of medications differ in dose effectiveness and side effects based on biological sex. Something as straightforward as a heart attack has different symptoms depending on if the patient is female or male. Denial of biological sex is dangerous, and as it stands, medical science has not advanced enough to change the biological sex of an individual. If you are born male, you will stay male for your entire life. You say that a transwoman who has taken estrogen is more genetically similar to a woman, I'm sorry but that simply isn't true. A male person will always be more genetically similar to other males than to a female person.

Determination of sex is very simple, it's about the easiest genetic test to do. They have kits for high school classrooms to try out ffs. We need to leave the "meaningful sex change is possible through medical intervention" thing in the past, all we accomplish with that is giving people false hope and an unattainable goal to fixate on. Sex is real and immutable, I wish it didn't matter, but it does.

And why it matters is, maleness and femaleness have become inseparable from certain stereotypes and assigned qualities by societies in human history. Overwhelmingly, the male people subjugate the female people. Since men, male humans, discovered womens' ability to give birth could be taken advantage of, it was capitalized upon. And this is the foundation of patriarchal society. Religions were founded to justify this as the will of god. To deny that women have historically been persecuted due to their sex is, well, misogynistic. There is no "woman feeling" that makes us targets for child marriages, FGM, trafficking/prostitution, and other horrors from the minute we're born and even before. No, it's the sex we were born with that makes the world think it can decide our fate. In fact, the way that people treat male children differently from female children is so different so early, that we are genuinely unable to study human behaviour unaffected by gendered expectations. This is what feminists are talking about when they discuss "socialization". There is not a single man on the planet who knows exactly what it's like to see the world from a woman's eyes, no matter how feminine that man is. Womanhood isn't something you can achieve or acquire through effort: you were either born a woman or you weren't, just like you were either born with detached earlobes or not. It's so simple.

All that to get to my final point: Yes, I believe the definition of womanhood comes down to biology, because anything beyond that is a meaningless stereotype. Women can do anything, be anyone, look any way they want, go through any experience they do. The one thing they have in common is that they are female adult human beings. There is not way to fail at being a woman or do it wrong, you just are. Womanhood is the experience of having been a female person in this world, and nothing else. There are certain things only female human beings need, like abortion and female contraceptive rights, access to spaces where we can be safe from our subjugators (male human beings), and the ability to define ourselves and fight for our collective rights.

(At this point you may object and point out that male people who identify as trans women are also subject to violence and scorn from men: unfortunately that is often the case, but this does not make male people who identify as women, well, female. We need solutions for them that do not involve requiring women to sacrifice our comfort and safety for the sake of a particular subset of men, because of the inherent risks involved and the fact that women do not owe men anything even when those men have it bad.)

One last thing: my opinion is that prescribing exogenous cross-sex hormones is unethical (so are all elective cosmetic medical procedures but that's a post for a different day). I understand the distress that gender dysphoria inflicts on people, however the ill effects of hrt are too numerous to condone. The huge increase in risk of stroke with estrogen, heart disease and uterine atrophy with testosterone, and the way that trans medicine studies are notorious for losing followup with patients after a year or less... it's short sighted and frankly, financially motivated. The amount of trans patients who are prescribed hormones without access to an endocrinologist, it's honestly infuriating. People deserve the best care possible, not lab rat bullshit where they cut you loose when it's not working out. I won't judge anyone for what they do to themselves to cope with distress, but I want everyone, especially girls, to be aware of the lifetime effects medical decisions may have, and that you also can find happiness within yourself without hurting your body.

Thanks again for your question, be well ✌️

By: Robert Lynch

Published: April 7, 2023

In my first year of graduate school at Rutgers, I attended a colloquium designed to forge connections between the cultural and biological wings of the anthropology department. It was the early 2000s, and anthropology departments across the country were splitting across disciplinary lines. These lectures would be a last, and ultimately futile, attempt to build interdisciplinary links between these increasingly hostile factions at Rutgers; it was like trying to establish common research goals for the math and art departments.

This time, it was the turn of the biological anthropologists, and the primatologist Ryne Palombit was giving a lecture for which he was uniquely qualified — infanticide in Chacma baboons. Much of the talk was devoted to sex differences in baboon behavior and when it was time for questions the hand of the chair of the department, a cultural anthropologist, shot up and demanded to know “What exactly do you mean by these so-called males and females?” I didn’t know it at the time but looking back I see that this was the beginning of a broad anti-science movement that has enveloped nearly all the social sciences and distorted public understanding of basic biology. The assumption that sex is an arbitrary category is no longer confined to the backwaters of cultural anthropology departments, and the willful ignorance of what sex is has permeated both academia and public discussion of the topic.

Male and female are not capricious categories imposed by scientists on the natural world, but rather refer to fundamental distinctions deeply rooted in evolution. The biological definition of males and females rests on the size of the sex cells, termed gametes, that they produce. Males produce large numbers of small gametes, while females produce fewer, larger ones. In animals, this means that males produce lots of tiny sperm (between 200 and 500 million sperm in humans) while females produce far fewer, but much larger, eggs called ova (women have a lifetime supply of around 400). Whenever scientists discover a new sexually reproducing species, gamete size is what they use to distinguish between the males and the females.

Although this asymmetry in gamete size may not seem that significant, it is. And it leads to a cascade of evolutionary effects that often results in fundamentally different developmental (and even behavioral) trajectories for the two respective sexes. Whether you call the two groups A and B, Big and Little, or Male and Female, this foundational cell-sized difference in gamete size has profound effects on evolution, morphology, and behavior. Sexual reproduction that involves the union of gametes of different sizes is termed anisogamy, and it sets the stage for characteristic, and frequently stereotypical, differences between males and females.

My PhD advisor, the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, was at that doomed colloquium at Rutgers. It was Trivers, who four decades earlier as a graduate student at Harvard, laid down the basic evolutionary argument in one of the most cited papers in biology. Throwing down the gauntlet and explaining something that had puzzled biologists since Darwin, he wrote, “What governs the operation of sexual selection is the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring.” In a single legendary stroke of insight, which he later described in biblical terms (“the scales fell from my eyes”), he revolutionized the field and provided a broad framework for understanding the emergence of sex differences across all sexually reproducing species.

Because males produce millions of sperm cells quickly and cheaply, the main factor limiting their evolutionary success lies in their ability to attract females. Meanwhile, the primary bottleneck for females, who, in humans, spend an additional nine months carrying the baby, is access to resources. The most successful males, such as Genghis Khan who is likely to have had more than 16 million direct male descendants, can invest relatively little and let the chips fall where they may, while the most successful women are restricted by the length of their pregnancy. Trivers’ genius, however, was in extracting the more general argument from these observations.

By replacing “female” with “the sex that invests more in its offspring,” he made one of the most falsifiable predictions in evolution — the sex that invests more in its offspring will be more selective when choosing a mate while the sex that invests less will compete over access to mates. That insight not only explains the rule, but it also explains the exceptions to it. Because of the initial disparity in investment (i.e., gamete size) females will usually be more selective in choosing mates. However, that trajectory can be reversed under certain conditions, and sometimes the male of a species will invest more in offspring and so be choosier.

When these so-called sex role reversals occur, such as in seahorses where the males “get pregnant” by having the female transfer her fertilized eggs into a structure termed the male’s brood pouch and hence becoming more invested in their offspring, it is the females who are larger and compete over mates, while the males are more selective. Find a species where the sex that invests less in offspring is choosier, and the theory will be disproven.

The assertion that male and female are arbitrary classifications is false on every level. Not only does it confuse primary sexual characteristics (i.e., the reproductive organs) which are unambiguously male or female at birth 99.8 percent of the time with secondary sexual characteristics (e.g., more hair on the faces of men or larger breasts in women), it ignores the very definition of biological sex — men produce many small sex cells termed sperm while women produce fewer large sex cells termed eggs. Although much is sometimes made of the fact that sex differences in body size, hormonal profiles, behavior, and lots of other traits vary across species, that these differences are minimal or non-existent in some species, or that a small percentage of individuals, due to disorders of development, possess an anomalous mix of female and male traits, that does not undermine this basic distinction. There is no third sex. Sex is, by definition, binary.

In the 50 years since Trivers’ epiphany, much has tried to obscure his crucial insight. As biology enters a golden age, with daily advances in genotyping transforming our understanding of evolution and medicine, the social sciences have taken a vastly different direction. Many are now openly hostile to findings outside their narrow field, walling off their respective disciplines from biological knowledge. Why bother learning about new findings in genetics or incorporating discoveries from other fields, if you can assert that all such findings are, by definition, sexist?

Prior to 1955, gender was almost exclusively used to refer to grammatical categories (e.g., masculine and feminine nouns in French). A major shift occurred in the 1960s when the word gender has been applied to distinguish social/cultural differences from biological differences (sex). Harvard Biologist, David Haig documented that from 1988 to 1999 the ratio of the use of “sex” versus “gender” in scientific journals shrank from 10 to 1 to less than 2 to 1, and that after 1988 gender outnumbered sex in all social science journals. The last twenty years have seen a rapid acceleration in this trend, and today this distinction is rarely observed. Indeed, the biological concept of sex in reference to humans has become largely taboo outside of journals that focus on evolution. Many, however, are not content with limiting the gender concept to humans and a new policy instituted by all Nature journals requires that manuscripts include a discussion of how gender was considered in all studies with human participants, on other vertebrates, or on cell lines. When would including gender be appropriate in a genetic study of fruit flies?

This change is not merely stylistic. Rather, it is part of a much larger cultural and political movement that denies or attempts to explain away the effects of biology and evolution in humans altogether. The prevailing dominant view in the social sciences is that human sex differences are entirely socially constructed. In that interpretation, all differential outcomes between men and women are the result of unequal social, economic, and political conditions, and so we do all we can to eliminate them, particularly by changing our expectations and encouraging gender-neutral play in children. This received wisdom and policies based upon it, however, are unlikely to produce the results proponents long for. Why is that?

Because sex differences in behavior are among the strongest effect sizes in social, and what might be better termed, behavioral sciences. Humans are notoriously inept at understanding differences between continuous variables, so it is first useful to define precisely what “statistical differences between men and women” does and does not mean. Although gamete size and the reproductive organs in humans are either male or female at birth in over 99 percent of cases, many secondary sexual characteristics such as differences in upper body strength and differences in behavior are not so differentially distributed. Rather, there is considerable overlap between men and women. Life scientists often use something called the effect size as a way to determine if any observed differences are large (and therefore consequential) or so small as to be ignored for almost all practical purposes.

Conceptually, the effect size is a statistical method for comparing any two groups to see how substantially different they are. Graphically, it can be thought of as the distance between the peaks of the two distributions divided by the width of those distributions. For example, men are on average about 6 inches taller than women in the United States (mean height for American women is 5 feet 3 inches and the mean height for American men is approximately 5 feet 9 inches). The spread of the height distributions for men and women, also known as the standard deviations, are also somewhat different, and this is slightly higher for men at 2.9 inches vs 2.8 inches for women. For traits such as height that are normally distributed (that is, they fit the familiar bell curve shape), one standard deviation on either side of the mean encompasses about 68 percent of the distribution, while two standard deviations on either side of the mean encompass 95 percent of the total distribution. In other words, 68 percent of women will be between 60.2 inches and 65.8 inches tall, and 95 percent will be between 57.5 to 68.6 inches. So, in a random sample of 1000 adult women in the U.S., approximately 50 of them will be taller than the average man (see figure above).

A large effect size, or the standardized mean difference, is anything over 0.8 and is usually seen as an effect that most people would notice without using a calculator. The effect size for sex differences in height is approximately 1.9. This is considered to be a pretty big effect size. But it is certainly not binary, and there are lots of taller-than-average women who are taller than lots of shorter-than-average men (see overlap area in figure). Therefore, when determining whether an effect is small or large, it is important to remember that the cutoffs are always to some degree arbitrary and that what might seem like small differences between the means can become magnified when comparing the number of cases that fall in the extremes of (the tails of their respective distributions) of each group.

In other words, men and women may, on average, be quite similar on a given trait but will be quite different in the number who fall at the extreme (low and high) ends of their respective distributions. This is particularly true of sex differences because natural selection acts more strongly on men, and males have had higher reproductive variance than females over our evolutionary history. That is to say that a greater number of men than women have left no descendants, while a very few men have left far more. Both the maximum number of eggs that a woman produces over the course of her reproductive life versus the number of sperm a man produces and the length of pregnancy, during which another reproduction cannot occur, place an upper limit on the number of offspring women can have. What this means is that males often have wider distributions for a trait (i.e., more at the low end and more at the high end) so that sex differences can be magnified at the tail ends of the distribution. In practical terms, this means that when comparing men and women, it is also important to look at the tails of their respective distributions (e.g., the extremes in mental ability).

The strongest effect sizes where men tend to have the advantage are in physical abilities such as throwing distance or speed, spatial relations tasks, and some social behaviors such as assertiveness. Women, meanwhile, tend to have an edge in verbal ability, social cognition, and in being more extroverted, trusting, and nurturing. Some of the largest sex differences, however, are in human mate choice and behaviors that emerge out of the evolutionary logic of Trivers’ parental investment theory. In study after study, women are found to give more weight to traits in partners that signal an ability to acquire resources, such as socioeconomic status and ambition, while men tend to give more weight to traits that signal fertility, such as youth and attractiveness.

Indeed these attitudes are also revealed in behavior such as age at marriage (men are on average older than women in every country on earth), frequency of masturbation, indulging in pornography, and paying for sex. Although these results are often dismissed, largely on ideological grounds, the science is rarely challenged, and the data suggest some biological difference (which may be amplified, indeed enshrined, by social practices).

The evidence that many sex differences in behavior have a biological origin is powerful. There are three primary ways that scientists use to determine whether a trait is rooted in biology or not. The first is if the same pattern is seen across cultures. This is because the likelihood that a particular characteristic, such as husbands being older than their wives, is culturally determined declines every time the same pattern is seen in another society — somewhat like the odds of getting heads 200 times in a row. The second indication that a trait has a biological origin is if it is seen in young children who have not yet been fully exposed to a given culture. For example, if boy babies are more aggressive than girl babies, which they generally are, it suggests that the behavior may have a biological basis. Finally, if the same pattern, such as males being more aggressive than females, is observed in closely related species, it also suggests an evolutionary basis. While some gender role “theories” can attempt to account for culturally universal sex differences, they cannot explain sex differences that are found in infants who haven’t yet learned to speak, as well as in the young of other related species.

Many human sex differences satisfy all three conditions — they are culturally universal, are observable in newborns, and a similar pattern is seen in apes and other mammals. The largest sex differences found with striking cross-cultural similarity are in mate preferences, but other differences arise across societies and among young children before the age of three as boys and girls tend to self-segregate into different groups with distinct and stereotypical styles. These patterns, which include more play fighting in males, are observable in other apes and mammal species, which, like humans, follow the logic of Trivers’ theory of parental investment and have higher variance in male reproduction, and therefore more intense competition among males as compared to females.

If so, why then has the opposite message — that these differences are either non-existent or solely the result of social construction — been so vehemently argued? The reason, I submit, is essentially political. The idea that any consequential differences between men and women have no foundation in biology has wide appeal because it fosters the illusion of control. If gender role “theories” are correct, then all we need to do to eliminate them is to modify the social environment (e.g., give kids gender-neutral toys, and the problem is solved). If, however, sex differences are hardwired into human nature, they will be more difficult to change.

Acknowledging the role of biology also opens the door to conceding the possibility that the existence of statistically unequal outcomes for men and women are not just something to be expected but may even be…desirable. Consider the so-called gender equality paradox whereby sex differences in personality and occupation are higher in countries with greater opportunities for women. Countries with the highest gender equality,24 such as Finland, have the lowest proportion of women who graduate college with degrees in stereotypically masculine STEM fields, while the least gender equal countries such as Saudi Arabia, have the highest. Similarly, the female-to-male sex ratio in stereotypically female occupations such nursing is 40 to 1 in Scandinavia, but only 2 to 1 in countries like Morocco.

The above numbers are consistent with cross-cultural research that indicates that women are, on average, more attracted to professions focused on people such as medicine and biology, while men are, again, on average, more attracted to professions focused on things such as mathematics and engineering. These findings are not a matter of dispute, but they are inconvenient for gender role theorists because they suggest that women and men have different preferences upon which they act when given the choice. Indeed, it is only a “paradox” if one assumes that sex is entirely socially constructed. As opportunities for women opened up in Europe and the United States in the sixties and seventies, employment outcomes changed rapidly. However, the proportions of men and women in various fields stabilized sometime around the early 1990s and have barely moved in the last thirty years. These findings imply that there is a limited capacity for outside interventions imposed from the top down to alter these behaviors.

In the cold logic of evolution, neither sex is, or can be, better or worse. Although this may not be the kind of equality some might want, we need to move beyond simplistic ideas of hierarchy.

It is understandable, however, for some to fear that any concession to nature will be used to justify and perpetuate bias and discrimination. Although arguments for why women should be prohibited from certain types of employment or why they should not be allowed to vote were ideological, sex differences have been used to justify a number of historical injustices. Still, is the fear of abuse so great that denying any biological sex differences is the only alternative?

The rhetorical contortions and inscrutable jargon required to assert that gender and sex are nothing more than chosen identities and deny what every parent knows require increasingly complex and incoherent arguments. This not only subverts the public’s rapidly waning confidence in science, but it also leads to extreme exaggerations designed to silence those who don’t agree, such as the claim that discussing biological differences is violence. The lengths to which many previously trusted institutions, such as the American Medical Association, go to deny the impact that hormones have on development are extraordinary. These efforts are also likely to backfire politically when gender-neutral terms are mandated by elites, such as the term “Latinx,” which is opposed by 98 percent of Hispanic Americans.

Acknowledging the existence of a biological basis for sex differences does not mean that we should accept unequal opportunities for men and women. Indeed, the crux of the problem lies in conflating equality with statistical identity and in our failure to respect and value difference. These differences should not be ranked in terms of inferior or superior, nor do they have any bearing on the worth or dignity of men and women as a group. They cannot be categorized as being either good or bad because it depends on which traits you want to optimize. This is real diversity that we should acknowledge and even celebrate.

Ever since the origin of sexual reproduction approximately two billion years ago, sexual selection, governed by an initial disparity in the size of the sex cells, has driven a cascade of differences, a few absolute, many more statistical, between males and females. As a result, men and women have been experiencing distinct evolutionary pressures. At the same time, however, this process has ruthlessly enforced an equality between the sexes, ensured by the fact that it takes one male and one female to reproduce, which guarantees the equal average reproduction of men and women. The production of sons and daughters, who inherit a near equal split of their parents’ genetic material, also demands that mothers and fathers contribute equally to their same- and their opposite-sex children. In the cold logic of evolution, neither sex is, or can be, better or worse. Although this may not be the kind of equality some might want, we need to move beyond simplistic ideas of hierarchy, naively confusing difference with claims of inferiority/superiority, or confusing dominance with power. In the currency of evolution, better just means more copies, dominance only matters if it leads to more offspring, and there are many paths to power.

The assertion that children are born without sex and are molded into gender roles by their parents is wildly implausible. It undermines what little public trust in science remains and delegitimizes other scientific claims. If we can’t be honest about something every parent knows, what else might we be lying about? Confusion about this issue leads to inane propositions, such as a pro-choice doctor testifying to Congress asserting that men can give birth. When people are shamed into silence about the obvious male advantages in almost all sports (but note women do as well or better in small bore rifle competition, and no man can match the flexibility of female gymnasts) and when transgender women compete in women’s sports, it endangers the vulnerable. When children are taught that all sex differences are entirely grounded in mere identity (whether self-chosen or culturally-imposed) and are in no way the result of biology, more “masculine” girls and more “feminine” boys may become confused about their sex, or sexual orientation, and harmful stereotypes can take over. The sudden rapid rise in the number of young girls diagnosed with gender dysphoria is a warning sign of how dangerously disoriented our culture can become.

Pathologizing gender nonconforming behavior often does the opposite of what proponents intend by creating stereotypes where none existed. Boys are told that if they like dolls, they are really girls trapped with male organs, while girls who display interests in sports or science are told they are boys trapped with female organs and born in the wrong body. Feminine boys, who might end up being homosexual, are encouraged to start down the road towards irreversible medical interventions, hormone blockers, and infertility. Like gay conversion therapy before, such practices can shame individuals for feeling misaligned with their birth sex and encourage them to resort to hormone “therapy” and/or surgery to change their bodies to reflect this new identity. Can that be truly seen as progressive and liberating?

The push for a biologically sexless society is an arrogant utopian vision that cuts us off from our evolutionary history, promotes the delusion that humans are not animals, and undercuts respecting each individual for their unique individuality. Sex is neither simply a matter of socialization, nor a personal choice. Making such assertions without understanding the profound role that an initial biological asymmetry in gamete size plays in sexual selection is neither scientific nor sensible. 

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Robert Lynch is an evolutionary anthropologist at Penn State who specializes in how biology, the environment, and culture transact to shape life outcomes. His scientific research includes the effect of religious beliefs on social mobility, sex differences in social relationships, the impact of immigration on social capital, how social isolation can promote populism, and the evolutionary function of laughter.

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I've said before that I learned more about evolution as a result of combatting evolution denial from the religious than I ever did at school. It's similarly true that I've learned more about sex, biology, chromosomes, genes and hormones as a result of the sex-denialism and anti-science attitudes of the gender cult.

"Approximately 80% of all patients diagnosed with autoimmune diseases are women."

For those of you who might wonder why this is the case, to shock nobody, we can add this to the list of mysterious medical conditions women experience that still remain elusive to the medical field.

However, there's some speculation:

Female sex hormones

The X chromosome

Microchimerism

Environmental factors

The microbiome

Antibodies

Interesting, considering female human beings actually have stronger immune systems than males.

To briefly talk about maybe the most overlooked and dismissed cause of high rates of autoimmune diseases in women, chronic stress (which presumably falls under "environmental factors") has been found to be strongly correlated with autoimmune diseases across multiple studies ("...up to 80% of patients reported uncommon emotional stress before disease onset), which can be triggered by even just one traumatic event, and anxiety disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, PTSD, etc. are extremely high for women in comparison to men.

Women experience PTSD two to three times the rate as men do (source), panic disorder is 2.5 times more common in women and girls than in men and boys (source), and generalized anxiety disorder (which is often treated as trivial and grossly overlooked) is again 2-3 times higher for women and girls than it is for men and boys (source). Behaviorally chronic stress and trauma also often presents differently between the sexes - "fight or flight" for men and "tend and befriend" (fawn and freeze) for women.

Men are more likely to commit physical, psychological, and sexual violence and women are more likely to respond to this violence by continuously be on the receiving end of their behavior and never leaving, even when their children are caught in the middle.

Chronic stress means persistent high levels of cortisol in women's bodies. There is sexual dimorphism in our immune systems. High cortisol leads to Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal (HPA) axis dysregulation (please, learn more about this).

This leads to heart issues, susceptibility to infectious diseases and auto-immune disorders, an unexplainable debilitating chronic fatigue that can lead to a bedridden life, multiple sclerosis, the progression and reoccurance of cancers, earlier HIV disease progression, and dementia. There's also the bidirectional problem in which HPA axis dysregulation, created from high levels of cortisol from chronic stress in the first place, also in turn biologically causes increased anxiety.

So...

Approximately 80% of all patients diagnosed with auto-immune diseases are women.

And auto-immune diseases are found to be strongly, strongly linked with stress disorders.

And women are several more times likely to experience trauma and stress disorders than males across the board.

And when stress is triggered, men are more likely to throw punches or leave and women are more likely to freeze and people please.

And men are vastly less likely to seek out a therapist to fix their issues or even demonstrate empathy for other men, instead using women as emotional crutches and punching bags.

And freezing and fawning for women often means staying in those same conditions even when there's a risk of death.

And staying in those same conditions when a woman has children and the means those children learn those behaviors and likely develop chronic stress themselves, and the cycle of trauma continues.

And even when women leave those conditions, we're far more likely to end up in re-traumatizing situations as we seek out familiar dynamics.

And even when we're able to break free from this dynamic, because we're far more likely to seek out and stay in therapy, we're still left with trying to resolve chronic, disabling, sometimes life-threatening health issues caused by HPA-axis dysregulation from chronic stress.

While HPA-axis dysregulation in turn generates anxiety, which then creates high cortisol, which results in a feedback loop.

This was supposed to be a short post, but I want to leave off with solutions. Please don't give up on your mental health. Religiously go to therapy. Have extremely high standards for yourself in your relationships. Practice diaphragmatic breathing, meditation, exercise. It's been found that moving your body through exercise, Thai-chi, sports, short walks, dance, whatever (to the best of your ability, if you're able) can really help - just know your limits. If you're not there yet take liquid vitamins as needed (vitamin deficiencies such as low B-vitamins, low magnesium, low good fats, and D3 also cause chronic stress, immunity issues, and chronic fatigue). Make those medical appointments. Eat well, socialize, rest (especially during a PEM or immunity crash), aim for 64 ounces of water a day. Leave miserable situations when you find your chance to. Learn the language of your body and listen to it, and have patience. I've had periods of being bedridden and unable to work. I'm getting better, but it hasn't just been one thing that has been a "fix". If this list overwhelms you, just pick one thing that's most doable. We matter.

Greed is Male Culture

This isn't a misandry post (sorry to disappoint). Neither is it an essay (yet). It's a deep reflection on what I think is the beginning of humanity's most evil systems, like the actual beginning. These are just my thoughts based on what I know, and I'm sure other people have said what I am about to. This is not a research paper (yet), but it is based on my readings regarding marxism, feminism, and industrial/colonial history (and some marginal knowledge of animal species). This is an opinion/think-piece, the beginning of some of my broader ideas.

I consider greed to be largely irrational and even (mostly) unnatural. Greed is not like hunger or fear. Greed, right now, is about excess. And I think excess is unnatural, and the desire for it even more so. Sort of like how plastic is from nature, but cannot decompose like organic matter. I think greed is a synthetic desire. Mimicking organic feelings like hunger or fear. In a world of safety, community and fulfilment, the desire for power over another is foreign. Unnatural. There are no threats. There is nothing to inspire the thought or desire of greed (especially coming from a materialist perspective). So how did the quest for power for the sake of power (and not safety, survival, or protection) come to be in human beings?

I posit that it could only (and did) arise from male-to-male peer relations.

In most animal (at least mammalian and some other) species, males do not need to be as populous as females. If you want a robust chance at a second generation of animals, you need only one male for twenty or so females. A handful of males of which females would select the best and breed with. The handful of males would have more than enough chances at partnering, and the females would have no shortage of seed if they so wanted to be pregnant.

But that's not the case. Males and females are 1:1, and sometimes, males are slightly more than females in most sexually dimorphic animal species.

So now we have some complications. Something that had been good in a previous context (males for seed) now became problematic. Now, imagine there are slightly more males than females in society. Up until this point, the value for the human male has been two things: seed and manual labor. This is the basis of his relevance to society and identity. These are the only two avenues for him to find any value as a man (not an individual). But now, he senses that he is in jeopardy. He is exceedingly replaceable! There are many men, so not only are the chances for his seed being chosen reduced, but the amount of seed he could spread is also reduced! He doesn't want to share, and he cannot stomach being replaceable or losing access to females, who are the ones who dictate whether he has a legacy or not. Whether he has offspring or not.

So now the many males have to compete. They have to be more flamboyant, robust, more beautiful than the other males so they can get picked by a female (note, they are not concerned with picking a female because any female will do). But the competition gets steeper and keeps escalating for different reasons (environmental or evolutionary) as time goes on. So now, violence, aggression, and killing have become parts of the competition. Like any sport, the rules and stakes evolve as time goes.

The choice of females is now diminished in this first stage. This is the beginning of the loss of their freedom. It is not that they are simply mating with the "prettiest" male, per se, but that they are also left with the male that survives the battle between males.

And thus the concept of "territory" arrives. Man has come to see other men as his greatest threat. Other men can annihilate him by annihilating his chances at offspring. This is not something women experience because every offspring is theirs, regardless of what seed it came from. Women can never be "erased" on a biological level, because their DNA is the blueprint of all humanity. It started with women and it will end when women end. But this is a big existential fear to men. They can be replaced. They were not the beginning. He (singular) can be erased. There are other men ready and willing to replace him.

So now man needs assurances. He needs to assert himself to other men so that the threat is mitigated. He knows other men are out to get him, because all men are now at war with each other. They evolved strength, not to protect women and children (because females in nearly every species have been the main if not sole providers and protectors), but to protect himself from other men. Really, it couldn't be to protect women and children, because female animals are able to wield similar weapons (claws, spears, stones, beaks) against threats to themselves or their young. No, men need strength to defend themselves from other men, who are out to propagate themselves. Men have become the special targets of other men.

And so, in this struggle, the competition evolves again. The stakes heighten. Man needs to assert himself to other men or he's dead meat, and he finds new ways to do so. At this point, he also realizes that women pose no threat to him in this sense. They do not seek to dominate him. He is not that relevant to her. He is replaceable. So women seize to be as important (in terms of threat) and become relegated to assets. Women do not need to assert themselves, so because they do not, man sees them as different to him. Not the same kind of animal. Not human. Women do not need to establish themselves using violence, and he equates that to women not having agency or ambition. Women now become assets. But he needs them as assurance. Remember, they are the only way he has legacy. So he must find a way to control them. To make them permanently his somehow. He asserts himself using violence, even reproductive violence and it works. Women are now part of the territory. Conquests and wars ensue. Men now view acquiring women and land as the same thing. Now in order to ensure their legacy, men know that it will not just take killing other men, but policing women. Even killing (but mainly stealing and raping) the women of other men since women are now resources and not people. Women cannot assert themselves physically the way men can. They cannot impregnate themselves. This is convenient for him to exploit.

Factions start to form. Kings, chiefs, and dictators rise up as territory and assets expand. Women die in in the crossfire, and policing them becomes more brutal. Their mistreatment from their own offspring and species has now become their biggest threat. Men are now the plunderers and predators of women. Women's resistance is a threat to his precious resources and assurances against other men and his annihilation. The increase of brutality towards women means that more women die, and there are more men than women, making competition even steeper. Now, man moves in packs. He hunts in packs. He covers more ground and acquires more territory, and so long as he is top of the hierarchy, the men beneath him pose no threat. If anything, he makes sure they benefit, for they help him better maintain that hierarchy. More men are required to fight other men and plunder their resources. Armies form. Nations form. Territory.

Now we come to the modern world. After a history of colonialism, capitalism, slavery, genocides, grotesque war. The underpinnings of all these systems are the same. Competition between males. For what? Hierarchy. Why? To assert himself to other males. To what end? His humanity.

Man, the animal, has now come to equate his personhood with supremacy. To men, dominance is a virtue, because to assert yourself, to impose your will, is to be human. Man needs something to be dominant over or he seizes to be relevant. Man needs something to subjugate, or he becomes meat to be devoured by other men. There are more men now than there ever was. The world suffers because ALL these men "need" to assert themselves, to become human to other men.

This is probably part of the reason why women aren't seen as human. Not simply because they are regarded as assets instead of persons, but because to be subjugated is to be inhuman. To be subjugated is how you become an asset. Or at least, dehumanizing you as an asset makes it easier to christen your subjugation as morally right and economically necessary. This idea is especially prevalent in politics since the 18th century. Man sees living things in two castes: dominant and submissive. Because that is how he sees himself in comparison to other men. Cattle, sheep, nature, men who take it from the back, women . . . submissive and thus inhuman. If a man can subject you, you are no longer human to him because you cannot or do not assert yourself in the way he does. You are now an asset that he can use to assert himself to other men. You are not a relevant threat. This is also possibly why pacifism is largely regarded as feminine or "pussification." Even unnatural. Men equate violence to agency since violence is when they start to become their own people.

This becomes even more plain when you look at the underpinings of man's existential thoughts throughout religion, art, and philosophy. What makes a man a man? What makes a man useful? What makes life meaningful to a man? What traits do they worship about god? Omnipotence. Omniscience. Being the owner of all things. The capacity to impose yourself and image on the world and to be able to do so forever via offspring. Ownership and property only became relevant to man when another man competed with him. Excess is useful now because it is a grand way of asserting yourself. Fame and excess are equated to legacy. Now, they are all that is worth striving for. As a boast to other men. A synthetic desire (greed) from an organic feeling (fear of threat).

Man's purpose is now to win the competition, no matter how silly the sport gets. To assert himself and be a threat. And if he is not a threat, he is irrelevant and unspectacular (to humanity). And if he is not relevant, as his ancestors once feared, . . . then what is he? He cannot become a woman who is eternally necessary and relevant to human society and history.

So what else can he be? There are only two options in the male world.

Both these options cannot do anything but ultimately destroy what humanity is left in him.

Greed only makes sense if the satisfaction (mimicking hunger) is found in other people's perception of you. Men need men to perceive them as successful, because that has been how they protected themselves from other men. And now that competition exists in all forms of society, whether economic or social, we all participate on some level with it. It's not that greed is natural to the human heart, but that it has become increasingly relevant to our societies, from how we consume to how we relate. Now, every fraction of society has to have its own model of dominant/submissive, superior/inferior, etc. Because men hate themselves, hate each other, and hate everyone else.

Anyways . . . nighty, night!

PS: This is kind of like conflict theory meets feminist analysis, and it's more of a collection of my ideas than anything else. I find it interesting to look at modern human politics and arts, at least between the 20th century and now, in this lens. If you don't like what I have to say, at least let your criticisms be constructive. I do not mind reasonable disagreement.

Damn you're a phd candidate and don't know that sex isn't just male and female, good luck with whatever field you're studying cause it's certainly not in biology.

humans are a sexually dimorphic species. intersex disorders are not third sexes. sex is different from gender. gender is not innate to the sexes. sex, as a neutral biological factor, is innate in humans. gender, as an artificial construct, is not innate to anything. sexuality is sex-based. sexism is sex-based. marginalisation on the bases of homosexuality and being female are what we call homophobia and misogyny. to be effective, feminism and gay rights advocates must recognise the sexes and the manmade hierarchy which societally hamstrings women and LBG people based on bigoted misconceptions about what social characteristics are supposedly innate to the sexes.

"My analysis challenges a number of ideas, some mentioned above, common in many Western feminist writings:

Gender categories are universal and timeless and have been present in every society at all times. This idea is often expressed in a biblical tone, as if to suggest that 'in the beginning there was gender.'

Gender is a fundamental organizing principle in all societies and is therefore always salient. In any given society, gender is everywhere.

There is an essential, universal category 'woman' that is characterized by the social uniformity of its members.

The subordination of women is a universal.

The category 'woman' is precultural, fixed in historical time and cultural space in antithesis to another fixed category—'man.'

... Merely by analyzing a particular society with gender constructs, scholars create gender categories. To put this another way: by writing about any society through a gendered perspective, scholars necessarily write gender into that society. Gender, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. The idea that in dealing with gender constructs one necessarily contributes to their creation is apparent in Judith Lorber's claim that 'the prime paradox of gender is that in order to dismantle the institution, you must first make it very visible.' In actuality, the process of making gender visible is also a process of creating gender. Thus, scholarship is implicated in the process of gender-formation."

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997) ~

"Feminist anthropologists of racialized peoples in the Americas tend not to think about the concept of gender when they use the term as a classificatory instrument, they take its meaning for granted. This, I claim, is an example of a colonial methodology. Though the claim that gender, the concept, applies universally is not explicitly stated, it is implied. In both group and conference conversations I have heard the claim that 'gender is everywhere,' meaning, technically, that sexual difference is socialized everywhere. The claim, implied or explicit, is that all societies organize dimorphic sexuality, reproductive sexuality, in terms of dichotomous roles that are hierarchically arranged and normatively enforced. That is, gender is the normative social conceptualization of sex, the biological fact of the matter. ... The critique of the binary has not been accompanied by an unveiling of the relation between colonization, race, and gender, nor by an analysis of gender as a colonial introduction of control of the humanity of the colonized, nor by an understanding that gender obscures rather than uncovers the organization of life among the colonized. The critique has favored thinking of more sexes and genders than two, yet it has not abandoned the universality of gender arrangements. ... Understanding the group with gender on one’s mind, one would see gender everywhere, imposing an order of relations uncritically as if coloniality had been completely successful both in erasing other meanings and people had totally assimilated, or as if they had always had the socio-political-economic structure that constitutes and is constituted by what Butler calls the gender norm inscribed in the organization of their relations. Thus, the claim 'There is gender everywhere' is false ... since for a colonized, non-Western people to have their socio-political-economic relations regulated by gender would mean that the conceptual and structural framework of their society fits the conceptual and structural framework of colonial or neocolonial and imperialist societies. ... Why does anyone want to insist on finding gender among all the peoples of our planet? What is good about the concept that we would want to keep it at the center of our 'liberation'?" María Lugones, "Gender and Universality in Colonial Methodology," in Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges (2022)

Big Guide to Humans: Lifespan and Development

Humans are not invincible, but despite their reputation for risk-taking, most humans do not die of injuries. Mostly, they die of time. Unlike many species that reach an adult stage and stay there until something (disease, war, mating, cultural practices) kills them, human bodies are in a constant progression into and through maturity. At the end of this progression, their cells damage themselves or each other faster than they can recover from, the human becomes weaker until one or more organ systems ceases function (beyond the ability of medicine to repair), and the human dies.

Most humans measure their age in "years," a time measurement based on their home planet. (A human in a non-human-majority ship or settlement will often figure out the formula for local time conversion soon after arrival; if the formula is not in your records, simply ask them.) A human with no abnormalities may live, on average, to around 150 "years," though this varies based on their personal history and genetics, with some humans being noticeably infirm before 100, and 200 years being rare but not unheard of. Diseases, injuries, and most abnormalities lower this span, some by a great deal and/or abruptly.

All Humans begin life as "babies," not literally a larval stage but similarly underdeveloped, in which for the first year of life they are unable — physically or intellectually — to walk or talk. For another year or two they are not able to do them very fluently. (Their external genitalia are present as part of their excretory system, but with no reproductive ability.) They are entirely dependent on their guardians (often but not always their biological parents). For the next eight to twelve years, they experience mostly steady growth, mentally and physically. Sexual dimorphism is negligible when clothed. Hair and clothing styles are used to signal gender, but this is based on human culture and requires a certain level of expertise to interpret. Although they are still dependent on their parents for securing provisions and for being taught, they are mobile and can take care of their short-term needs. Especially at the end of this range, other humans would consider it safe to leave them briefly unattended. At approximately twelve years old, plus or minus two years, or plus/minus four or more in extreme cases, they enter a multi-year stage of rapid growth called "puberty" in which their reproductive system begins to mature and they start to display sexual dimorphism. By around 18 years of age, and almost certainly by age 20, they will have reached their full adult height and level of "secondary sexual characteristics," the most obvious being a deeper voice and facial hair for males (though they may remove the hair for aesthetic reasons) and breast weight for females, along with body hair and that particular human scent. During this time, they are nearly as intellectually capable as an adult human. However, as they are experiencing adult emotions for the first time, their moods can be unstable. Additionally, their understanding of risk is poor even by human standards, and it is important to check with their guardians before engaging in activities that you may be tempted to think sound reasonable for a human. Because their intellectual and emotional development lags sharply behind their reproductive development, and because they do not have a "finished" adult stage, humans have declared "18 years old" to be when adulthood begins and one is allowed to register for military service, enter into legal agreements, consume mind-altering substances, and engage in cross-species sexual relationships. !! Clarification: If you mate with or even attempt to mate with a human under 18 years old, they will not be punished. You will face severe repercussions from the human and/or Unified legal systems, in addition to high risk of humans' Protected Cultural Practice of violence to protect family and children. !!

As imprecise as developmental timing is before adulthood, it is even more so afterward. It is simply not possible to give an accurate accounting of when certain markers of human age will appear, or even in what order. Like a human's life span, it depends on personal history and genetics, and even a person who will live to be 200 might show signs of aging by age 30. Some humans never display certain signs. This list is not exhaustive. - New head or face hairs growing in grey or white instead of their original color. - Facial skin softening until it begins to crease and fold under its own weight (while human facial expressions often involve wrinkling the skin, those lines are not permanent). - Head hairs not being replaced when they fall out (earlier and more apparent in males, sometimes beginning even before adulthood). - Loss of teeth: Humans lose some teeth and replace them before puberty, but teeth lost later in life will not grow back. Because loss of teeth makes eating difficult, it is very likely for lost teeth to be replaced artificially. - Irregularly-shaped patches of darker skin, about .01-03 LocalAreaUnits, on some lighter-skinned humans. - Complaints of pain in joints. - New weakness in the sense of hearing. - New weakness in the sense of vision, beyond what can be easily corrected with adjustment lenses. - Weakness of memory, moreso for recent events than distant events. - A "stooped" posture in which the neck (the support column for the head) is held at a forward angle and the shoulders are in front of the chest. Some younger humans may have this for non-aging reasons, but otherwise it is one of the last signs of aging to develop, signaling the progression of the body's inability to repair itself.

If you are only encountering humans in a work environment — on a battleship for example, as opposed to a residential or mixed-use ship or a settlement — it is likely that all the humans you meet are adults who, regardless of age, are not nearing the end of their lifespan.

Really enjoy your work! Do you have any thoughts on sex/gender in pony society? Since in canon there are very few male characters there's some fan theories they have a different sex ratio. Or in the more speculative biology space they could just not have the same level/kind of dimorphism as humans.

Sex ratio is an interesting phenomenon! Deer can be anywhere from equal to twice as many females. Female horses throw more fillies as they get older. And Pegasus are made up.

Since my "ponies" are 3 different species, they all have different biological histories, including sex ratios. But at this point in time, the ratios are about 1:1, equally "Mares" and "Stallions" Stallions tend to be more physically powerful than mares, but not to the point of looking particularly different.

POLITICS, however, is still very much affected by gender.

In Skyscraper Gods Equestria, society is currently equalizing to be more open and flexible after centuries of matriarchal rule. Mares are seen as more fit to rule because they are closer to the feminine goddesses, and Equestria is a theocracy with rulers (often female) appointed by god. Smaller governments and towns who elect and appoint officials tend towards mares as well, with stallion mayors still being the first of their kind in some places.

Though it hasn't happened yet (that society knows of) there is nothing that prevents a stallion from being eligible for godhood. Rather, it is something that goddesses have only chosen to bestow on mares so far. This is a self-perpetuating system, as less stallions being in leadership positions means less candidates for the gods to pick from, and less stallion leaders make society think they are less capable than mares.

Equestria is the favored land of the Gods that control the sun, moon, love, and friendship, but they are not the only gods in the world (though nationalism will try to convince you otherwise)

Outside Equestria, species other than ponies dominate. They have their own systems of governments (theocracy, monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, plutocracy, etc) that are not based on Equestrian Goddess' will or genders. Many populations of griffons are male-dominated, rooted in sexual dimorphism.

The Crystal Empire vanished before the rise of the Goddesses Sun and Moon. When they came back with thousand-year-old citizens, they were immediately annexed by modern-day Equestria, which installed their own ruler (The Princess of Love) into the power vacuum left by King Sombra. She serves Equestrian interests, but will one day be convinced to step down by the Princess of Friendship in favor crystal pony officials elected by their own people.

TLDR: male and female ponies occur at the same rate, but females are more prominent due Equestria's matriarchy (which itself is due to the known gods being feminine)

"Your brain isn’t different because you’re trans"

Doc Impossible does her best to debunk the idea that there are female and male brains, and that this can explain the gender identity of trans people.

She writes:

One of the most persistent myths in our entire community is that a person is trans because our brain structures are more like our real gender than our gender assigned at birth. In many ways, this hypothesis has been the transgender version of the old 00’s hunt for the gay gene (spoiler, there isn’t one; it’s complex genetic and epigenetic influence, just like being trans is)—it’s given us a biological explanation for why we’re trans, and why gender transition is an absolute necessity for so many of us.... That hypothesis was dealt an absolute death-blow a few years back, though, and it wasn’t even the direct target of the death-blow. Eliot et al, in 2020, published the largest meta-study ever even attempted on the structure of human brains and how they were related (or not) to sex, including all research done in the last thirty years on brain structure.  They weren’t even looking at trans brains here, not directly—though they included all of the research on trans brains too, since it met their inclusion criteria—they were looking at how gender and sex interacted for brain structure for all people, trans and cis. After all this work, they found that there was no significant difference between male and female brains so decisively that they titled the damn paper “Dump the ‘dimorphism.’” Their research said, in short, that only about 1% of the brain had any difference at all between male and female people, structurally, and the only real difference was sheer size, because males are, on average, bigger than females.

No, this does not mean that there are no biological components to the gender identities of trans people. There probably is. But there is no definite proof of trans men having a blue chip in their brain or trans women having a pink one.

Instead the more likely explanation is that transgender identities, like non-heterosexual sexual orientations, grow out of complex genetic and epigenetic processes, shaped by culture and lived lives.

What We Know About Trans Brains

Illustration: akinbostanci

Gender dimorphism in WoF dragons

I don't like that in the world of WoF, dragons don't have any gender demorphism. It's too boring. That's why I created this headcanon where some tribes have gender dimorphism. Firstly, I think it’s worth starting with how dragons determine each other’s biological sex, despite the fact that they have no external differences. Answer: smell. My guess is that female and male dragons smell different because they emit different pheromones. Therefore, for many tribes, pronounced gender demorphism is far from necessary. However, some are exceptions. The most striking exception is seawings!

As with many marine animals, female seawings are often larger than males. Antennae in males and females are located in different places (in males they look like mustaches). They grow throughout their lives, are very sensitive and perform a very important function of orientation in space and sensation of vibrations in water. Females are large and strong. They carry a huge number of fragile, and mostly unfertilized eggs (in one clutch there can be about 30 tiny eggs. Of these, 1-4 dragonets survive. This is necessary so that some marine predator could accidentally eat an unfertilized egg, so In this way, other babies can born.) The laying of eggs is usually looked after by males. In their forms they are more graceful and delicate. They take care of the eggs, and in the future, the babies, raise them. Females are protectors and providers. The males also performed “light shows” and dances to impress the females. This all greatly influenced the kind of society seawings developed. Unlike other tribes, seawings have gender roles, stereotypes, and even sexism (and if there is sexism, then there is homophobia and transphobia). Males are considered the “fair and weaker sex.” They very rarely occupy high roles and are often involved in raising children (Captain Shark was an exception because he trained and generally occupies an important role from birth.). Their status depends on the female. Males often wear jewelry, etc. The situation is completely opposite for females. They are more likely to receive education, receive high positions and roles, serve in the army and become military leaders. Seawing Kingdom has a very strict matriarchy. Interestingly, when the seawings first come to the mainland, they are very surprised that other tribes do not have such gender inequality.

Hivewings don't have the same extreme gender fixation that seawings do. Their society, like that of other tribes, is equal for dragons of different genders. Their gender dimorphism consists only in the fact that males are often slightly larger than females and their central horns are forked (this was useful when they were wild and fought physically for females)