There’s a bird in Texas got em all beat!
Image Link (Stunning! Suprising!)
http://i.livescience.com/images/i/16723/original/9CardinalMF_K509082smalledited.jpg?1305683133
The aliens were from the planet Cheron.
Just sayin’.
And the Cardinal was from Texas.
's cool.
And somewhere there is another cardinal which is male on the right side, and female on the left, and has been hunting this one down for centuries.
I find the funky chickens a little disturbing.
One of these days we’ll have an interesting article such as this whose authors don’t feel the need to gratuitously festoon the photo section with transphobic slurs.
I missed something?
:rolleyes: The bird is not a transsexual. The bird is literally both male and female at the same time. “He-she” is perfectly accurate.
In other words, a hermaphrodite?
Or pseudohermaphrodite, something that has features from both genders but isn’t really fully functional as both; the story uses the term “gynandromorph”.
Here, lemme hold that soapbox so it doesn’t shift on you.
To be fair, “he-she” IS the kind of term that gets thrown around by transphobics, along with “it”.
And “darkie” and “negro” are thrown around by racists, but you don’t see ravens and crows getting upset with terms that don’t apply to them.
Watch it, Bignose!
To be fair, while there may be occasions when a word like “shemale” can be legitimately used in ornithology, laymen should be niggardly in their use.
Very dramatic in a large vertebrate organism (like a bird). Common in insects. I’ve pulled gynandromorphic mosquitoes out of our colonies for years, usually in conjunction with mosaicism - we have mutant mosquito strains with different eye colors or whatever, and usually the gynandromorphs show up in crosses between the mutant and wild-type strains, where they not only are half-male, half-female, but are a mix of wild-type and mutant eyes.
I’ve seen bilateral gyn’s (like that bird), as well as dorsal-ventral gyn’s (female head, male body).
Oh you know perfectly well those terms were used to sensationalize the story by analogizing the organisms to humans for whom those words are used as slurs. There’s no good reason to do so and it should not be done. It demeans both trans people and zoology.
I did NOT spit on the keyboard. Only because I wasn’t drinking anything.
For once, rabid debate is nicely mixed with science.
Cool.
At first I thought you were being hypersensitive, matt_mcl, but then I I saw a link at the bottom of the page to a gallery titled Stunning She-Males of the Animal World on the same site. That is blatantly offensive and eliminates any doubt they might otherwise have gotten the benefit of with regards to the main article.