Animals aren't always as 'trans' as advertised, and although clownfish change sex, they can also breathe underwater, which you--also can't.
We share this glorious planet with God’s or Darwin’s gorgeous array of creatures, at least the ones who haven’t been exterminated by overeager hunters or who are in the process of dying off from the effects of global warming (Great Barrier Reef, we hardly knew ye!).
The biological miracle of life on earth includes some fun facts you may not know: We human beans share our DNA with just about every other plant, animal, and even the mold in your fridge. For example, we share 99% of our DNA with each other. That’s right, ‘those people’ you hate are almost exactly like you! Obsessively intolerant to genetic variation much? We share 90% of our DNA with kitty kats and 84% with our faithful doggos, which kind of calls into question why they’re a hair farther away from us than our nonplussed cats. Check this out: We share 60% of our DNA with bananas—bananas!—and only 44% with honeybees, which have some semblance of a brain, even though they’re light-years from putting the first honeybee trans-butterfly into a Bud Light commercial. We share the same amount of DNA with bananas as we do with fruit flies so that explains that. Even the fungus among us are more closely related at nearly 50%. That’s right, mushrooms are closer to animals and people, genetically, than honeybees and plants.
There’s something for vegetarians and vegans to contemplate as they order the stuffed mushroom caps appetizer.
Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you need to be kinder to the mold in your fridge as you clean it off with a hyper-sanitized sponge and twelve rubber gloves, or that weird pink stuff that grows in your bathtub. But it does mean one thing: Just because we share some ATGCs (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, the DNA compounds) with other life-forms doesn’t mean we are or can change into the only other opposite sex there is. The one that you’re not.
The Transformers we ain’t.
Fellow power feminist and sophomoric silliness-seeking subscriber Persephone Phoenix pointed me toward another delightfully transphobic article about the trans-ness—or not—of other life forms, from Quillette. From Banana Slugs To Human Beings, There Are Just Two Sexes.
Go read it. It’s hilarious. Remember to come back here when you’re done. If you do, I promise you some red-hot super-sexy gastropodous (yes, that’s a real word!) porn action in a True-Life Adventure you ain’t never seen from Walt Disney!
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Anyway. Now that you know more about sequential hermaphroditism than you ever cared to know, let’s talk about the lies and misinformation spread by people with an absolute holy terror of being what they were born to be: Human males or females. Specifically, reality-phobic transactivists.
They love to argue that because some creatures change sex, it means we can too. They use clownfish as a primary example because—please take notes, there will be a quiz later—clownfish are customarily born male and only change female when the other guys need one. I’m not sure how this works - whether they send around an email asking for volunteers or whether only one fish transsexualizes and they all jump upon her in a massive orange and white fishy gang bang, but clownfish do in fact qualify as transsexual animals because they can change from one sex to another without checking into a gender identity clinic. If human males could change their gonads from testes to ovaries like clownfish, their balls would somehow rise into their hips to become ovaries and I guess their ding-dong would somehow widen, blossom outward, and develop some way for the baby to emerge victorious, clutching its little endlessly striped Pride flag. But no human male has ever done this. Clownfish can do it, but humans can’t. Clownfish can also breathe underwater, which humans can’t do either. Just sayin’.
Jellyfish also qualify as transsexuals, because they not only change sex, but they can be two different types of hermaphrodites at the same time! (Frankly, I think that’s just showing off and shaming the clownfish.) Not only are these pulsating blobs able to change sex, but they’re also ‘simultaneous’ hermies because they can display both sexual characteristics at the same time. But they have no brain whatsoever. Which, now that I think about it, indicates they have more in common with transactivists than I initially gave them credit for. Point to you, TERF-haters!
Oysters are also part of the be-what-you-want-to-be sex-changers, and just to be disgusting, they are the bukkake champions of the animal world. Even worse, it’s self-bukkake! They spray a cloud of sperm into the water which then impregnates them. So when you tell an oyster to go fuck itself, it probably will.
The black sea bass sex changes in reverse order: They begin their lives as females and then later turn male if they watch enough Jeffrey Marsh videos or hang out on TikTok a lot.
And then there’s one of my favorite transsexual animals: The extremely broad-minded American slipper limpet, which is a very common critter up and down the U.S. eastern seaboard. Empty slipper shells look like slippers, hence the name, and I can tell you from my adolescence they make for lovely ring-y beach mobiles. They’re also the most orgiastic sluts in all of Earthlandia as they pile on top of each other and hump away—or whatever it is that slipper limpets do when they’re in the throes of love—and they actually shag through the shells, because this is how the whole crazy fucked up sex life of slipper limpets gets. If a slipper limpet is clinging to a rock somewhere all sad and lonely, he turns into a chick, sends out a ‘come fuck me’ signal to the other limpets, and they all pile on top of her and they shag the shit out of her! And they all fertilize her! Like seriously, the paternity suit must be a nightmare. How the hell four of five guys piled one on top of the other manage to impregnate the lone female at the bottom of the orgy pile is beyond me, but I’ll bet human males reading this right now are simultaneously grossed out and turned on by this sexual scenario that we can also add to the list of ‘Things Transsexual Animals Can Do That You Can’t’.
The Quillette article points out that many animals in the original article by a gay rights organization on eighteen alleged trans animals aren’t in fact trans at all, just kinda queer-ish. Some definitely resemble transactivists in that they’ll fake being the opposite sex to try and get laid. Count among them the ruff, a Eurasian wading bird, for pulling shit like that.
There are a few other genuinely transsexual animals mentioned, but it’s important to note the species that are missing—like all mammals and primates. Not a single one of us hair- or fur-bearers change sex, not even with a team of surgeons and a boatload of cross-sex hormones. Look, a real transsexual can change sex and still get pregnant or get someone pregnant (especially one extremely exhausted female limpet). In the end, there are indeed several animals or creatures who can change sex but we’re not any of them. Just as some animals can breathe underwater or fly and we can’t do either of those things without scuba tanks or airplanes. Flying from Hartford to Dallas-Fort Worth doesn’t make you a bird any more than not being able to change sex, as your cat or dog or budgie can’t do, makes them human.
So stop it with the faux biology already, chilluns.
And if you’ve made it this far learning about weird sex-switching practices in the animal kingdom, you deserve that promised slug porn! I wrote this many years ago for a creative writing group and it’s since been recycled more often than a Marvel Comics franchise. I’ll be honest, banana slugs don’t really qualify as sex-changers either except in the case of a particularly unfortunate circumstance. But you know what? If you can impregnate someone while dangling from a snot rope three feet above the ground, which is how most of them get down over the ground.,I for one will happily gender you as ‘it’, or ‘they’ for the rest of your life!
WARNING: The following is NSFW. It contains graphic, gratuitous, brutally frank descriptions of superhot slug sex! You’ve been warned.
“Hey baby, you ever do it in the air?”
“Uh, is there any other way?” I asked. I joined the Yard High Club last year.
“We could do it on a rock wall,” it said. Well, that would be a new one for me. Last year, the first time I ever mated, my mate and I did it suspended from a slime thread about sixteen inches long. While a rock wall had an air of kinky novelty about it, I wanted to stick to what I knew. Look, this is only my second time reproducing ever, you know? I’ve probably got four more good shags left in me assuming I’m not eaten by a bird or used as fish bait.
I’m a banana slug, and hey, it’s spring. Lovely, glorious spring, warm and moist and hardly any birds around because their migration systems have been totally hosed by global warming for the last several years.
“What’s your name?” I asked it. It was the hottest slug I’d seen in a year. Long, Chiquita yellow, and covered in slime, just the way I like ‘em.
“Leslie,” it said. “And yours?”
“Chris,” I replied. We’re hermaphroditic, although occasionally some of us are turned into females. Which won’t happen to me because I’m very careful where I stick my thing when mating. I don’t mean to brag or anything, but I am extremely well-endowed for a banana slug. My mighty mandingo is nearly half my total body length. Well okay, so is everyone else’s, unless they’ve been apophollated, which happens if you get stuck in someone’s orifice. Whoever isn’t stuck gnaws off the pathetic pudd of the one who is. That’s how you get chickified.
So we slimed around each other for a bit, doing a size check on each other’s tunnel o’ love, then began our mating dance, waving our colossal love cannons in the air above our heads, which you can do when your penis is located there.
We circled each other for hours, then dangled from a long strand of snotty-looking slime, swaying in the gentle breezes as we writhed around each other and engaged in a mutual yellow squirmy shag-a-thon. I came, it came. It was great. It was beautiful. I quivered from the sheer glory of the miracle of mutual reproduction.
Leslie pulled out of me. “Okay, it was nice bumping slimies with you,” it said. “I’d like to stick around and chat, maybe share a plate of fungi or dog poop, but I gotta run. If I hurry home I can just catch Stephen Colbert. So can you please disengage?”
“Can I what?”
“Can you unfasten yourself please?”
“Huh?”
“WILL YOU TAKE YOUR DICK OUT OF MY — what the hell do we call
these other things anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but okay. Sorry, didn’t mean to keep you.”
I pulled. And tugged. And yanked.
“What’s the matter?” Leslie asked.
Oh no.
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