Strike “His”

I have kept aquariums since I was ten. I read about clownfish before I had any word for myself, and what I understood was that a clownfish could become something else, and I could not.

This was a childhood spent inside other people’s certainties about what a body was for. The certainties were narrow and they were enforced, and the things I was shamed for did not yet have names. Then a book about reef fish said, in the flat voice textbooks use for ordinary facts, that the largest fish in the anemone is female and was not always.

I wanted that. Not as a metaphor — as a capability. I wanted to be a gender-bending shapeshifter, confined to no set of predetermined roles, free from judgement and shame, allowed to be me. Around the same time I found The Left Hand of Darkness and wanted to be ambisexual like Estraven, and those two wants were plainly the same want.

This zine is what happened when I went back, forty years later, and checked.

What I found is not what I was reaching for, and it is better. The animals do not do what I wanted them to do. Some of them do something stranger, some of them do something worse, and none of them — not one — hands us permission. The permission was never theirs to give, and we did not need it. That takes fourteen more spreads, and the first eight are just the biology, straight.

Anemonefish are protandrous. Every one of them is born male. In each anemone there is one large breeding female, one smaller breeding male, and a queue of smaller non-breeders who are not doing anything at all.

When the female dies, the breeding male becomes female, and the largest non-breeder moves up into the breeding male slot. Hans and Simone Fricke established the mechanism in Nature in 1977, and the title says what it is: monogamy and sex change by aggressive dominance. The female holds the male down. The male holds the queue down. Remove the top of the hierarchy and the next body rebuilds itself.

So the first thing to say about the fact I loved at ten is that I had it backwards. I read sex change and heard choice. What the anemonefish has is a rigid social ladder with a sex attached to each rung, and a body obedient enough to follow the ladder wherever it goes.

This is not a disappointment and I am not going to write it as one. A body that can rebuild its gonads in adulthood is an astonishing thing whatever the social system around it. But the fact does not mean what I wanted it to mean, and the whole discipline of this zine is refusing to let a fact mean what I want.

The bluehead wrasse runs the process in the other direction — female to male — and in 2019 Erica Todd and colleagues watched the whole cascade happen and traced it to the molecular level.

Remove the dominant male from a reef group and the largest female begins behaving as a male within hours. Not days. Hours. The gonad follows: a mature ovary is remodelled into a functional testis in about eight to ten days, and the animal is producing sperm inside twenty-one.

The trigger is social — the absence of the male, seen — and it arrives in the body as stress signalling. What follows is the part that stopped me. The gonad does not merely switch on a different programme. It reprograms its own chemical marks on the DNA, methylation at the aromatase gene among them, and passes through an intermediate state in which the epigenetic machinery resembles that of early developmental cells.

Whatever “this body is female” is stored as, it is not stored anywhere permanent enough to survive a fortnight of the fish needing it otherwise.

The deepest assumption in the room is not which sex you are. It is that the answer comes from a set of two. It does not. Two is a description of some animals, mistaken for a law of life.

Schizophyllum commune is a split-gill fungus, extremely common, probably growing on a fallen branch within walking distance of wherever you are reading this. Its mating compatibility is governed by four loci, and the alleles known at each are roughly nine, thirty-two, nine and nine. Multiply them out and the number of mating types is somewhere above twenty-three thousand. Almost any two individuals that meet are compatible.

Tetrahymena thermophila, a pond ciliate, has seven, and each cell settles which of the seven it will be during development — the outcome is not inherited straightforwardly, it is worked out. And in isogamous algae the two gametes that fuse are the same size and the same kind. There is no sperm. There is no egg. The words have nothing to attach to.

Set those beside each other and the two-sex model stops looking like the floor of biology and starts looking like what it is: a very successful local arrangement, in animals and flowering plants, that we then read backwards onto everything alive.

The mating-type count is a product, and we are showing our working. Kothe titled the 1996 review “Tetrapolar fungal mating types: sexes by the thousands,” and the figure comes from multiplying the known alleles at the four loci — so it is a count of combinations, and it moves as more alleles are described. It is a real number about a real fungus, and it is not a precise one.

Seahorses, pipefishes and sea dragons are the only vertebrates where the male is the pregnant one. The male carries the eggs in a sealed brood pouch, and in seahorses that pouch grows an inner epithelium that researchers call a placenta: the embryos attach to it, and it supplies them.

Which raises the problem every pregnancy has. The embryos are genetically foreign, and an immune system that works properly will attack them. Mammals solved this one way. Syngnathids solved it by throwing parts of the immune system away.

Roth and colleagues found in 2020 that the whole lineage has lost the MHC class II pathway — a piece of adaptive immunity so central that its absence in a vertebrate was not thought to be survivable. Later work added the loss of three Toll-like receptors, TLR1, TLR2 and TLR9, conserved across vertebrates and central to immune tolerance in the uterus and placenta elsewhere. One lineage has lost normal spleen function.

I want to be careful about how this lands, because it is the spread most available to being turned into a moral. It is not a story about sacrifice. Nothing chose. A lineage in which the immune genes were lost turned out to be a lineage in which males could carry embryos to term, and that is the whole of it.

Why this is here and not in the marvels. Every capability in this zine is a trade, and the trades are usually invisible because the capability is the interesting part. A body that can do an unusual thing is not a body that got something for free — and that is worth saying out loud where most of us have spent our lives being told our differences ought to come with compensating gifts.

Ursula K. Le Guin published The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. Its people, the Gethenians, have no fixed sex. They spend most of the month in somer, sexually latent; for a few days they enter kemmer and take on a sex, which one depending on who they are with. Anyone may father a child. Anyone may bear one.

Roughly halfway through, Genly Ai — the envoy from Earth, and the most confused person in the book — reports a piece of palace news, and the paragraph ends in four words:

It is one of the great sentences, and almost every time it is quoted, the sentence next door is left behind. Here is what happens when the news reaches the villages: “I found this funny, and so did the clansmen of Gorinhering, but for different reasons. They said he was too old to be bearing children, and they got hilarious and obscene on the subject.”

They laugh. Of course they laugh — but not at a man being pregnant, because that is not a thing that exists to laugh at. They laugh because Argaven is too old.

That is the whole novel doing its work in one joke. Le Guin does not argue that the category is optional. She builds a room where the category is absent and then shows you the mockery landing somewhere else — on age, on the king’s vanity, on politics. The reader supplies the shock, discovers the shock was theirs, and has nowhere to put it down. The Karhiders are not being tolerant. They have nothing to tolerate.

On the Ice, hauling a sledge across a glacier with the Earthman he has ruined himself to protect, Estraven speaks a poem. It is called Tormer’s Lay, and it is where this collection’s oldest ideas about wholeness keep turning up.

Almost everyone stops there. The next sentence is: “My voice shook as I said the lines, for I remembered as I said them that in the letter my brother wrote me before his death he had quoted the same words.”

Estraven’s brother was also his kemmering and the father of his child, which Karhide permits until it does not; the brother is dead, and this is the poem he sent. So the lines about two-being-one are not a serene piece of cosmology. They are a love letter and a suicide note, being recited on a glacier by the person who received it.

And one page earlier, in the ethnological notes, Genly Ai reaches the observation the whole book was built to reach: “I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic.”

Our own shelf got there from the other direction. The field guide to being family is nineteen entries of animals caring for young that are not theirs — bonobos adopting across group lines, a dolphin raising another species’ calf, mongooses that do not sort pups by relatedness. Le Guin deduced it in 1969 and the ethologists spent fifty years confirming it.

In 1976 Le Guin wrote an essay about the book, called “Is Gender Necessary?” In 1987 she reprinted it — and did something almost nobody does.

She did not revise it. She set the 1976 text down entire and ran her disagreements alongside it in bracketed italics, so that the reader sees the error and the correction at the same time. Her reason, in the headnote:

Then she instructs us. “I request and entreat anyone who wishes to quote from this piece henceforth to use or at least include these reconsiderations.” Most people quoting the 1976 essay disobey her. This zine is doing as it is told.

What she corrects is not small. She had called the Gethenians “he” and refused to invent a pronoun — “This ‘utter refusal’ of 1968 restated in 1976 collapsed, utterly, within a couple of years more.” She had said the pronouns did not much matter — “I now consider it very important.” And, hardest of all, from the woman who had built the great novel of ambisexuality:

She invented a world with no fixed sex, and paired everybody off straight without noticing she had done it. That is what a default is. It survives the imagination that was built to escape it, because it does not present itself as an assumption — it presents itself as the absence of one.

And then, mid-sentence, describing Estraven as a mother “with his children,” she stops and writes the instruction this zine is named for.

Why this is the centre of the piece and not an aside about a novelist. Everything else here is an organism doing what it does. This is the only spread where somebody found the thing they could not see, and published the finding next to the error instead of over it. That is the whole method of this project — it is why our changelog lists what we got wrong, why No. 1 is left unrepaired with its bad sentence intact, and why A Promise, Not a Finding exists at all. Le Guin got there in 1987 and said it better: minds that don’t change are like clams that don’t open.

Here is mine, since I have just spent a spread admiring somebody for printing hers.

Bonobos were, to me, a liberatory model — what humans could have if we dropped our learned phobias. Female-female genital rubbing, sex used to defuse conflict rather than to reproduce, food shared instead of fought over, females allied against male aggression. Make love, not war, with a genome 98 per cent ours. I believed it for thirty years and I used it in arguments.

The sexual behaviour is real and well documented. The utopia is not.

In 2024 Maud Mouginot and colleagues did the boring, necessary thing: they followed twelve male bonobos at Kokolopori and fourteen male chimpanzees at Gombe for two years and counted. Male bonobos engaged in about 2.8 times as many aggressive encounters as the chimpanzees, and roughly three times as many physical ones. Male-male and female-male aggression were both higher than in chimps. And the males with the highest rates of contact aggression had the greatest mating success — at Kokolopori, two of them sired 80 per cent of the offspring in the sample.

That last part is the real finding and it survives intact: lethal aggression within and between communities is common in chimpanzees and absent in bonobos, and female coalitions do constrain male behaviour in ways chimpanzee societies do not. Something genuinely different is happening. It is simply not the thing I wanted.

What I actually did wrong. Not believing a false fact — believing a selected one. Every element of the story I carried is attested. I assembled them into a society, needed that society to exist, and stopped looking. A boy who has been told his whole life that he is unnatural will go looking for an animal that says otherwise, and he will find one, because the animals are numerous and he is only counting the hits. Which is precisely why the next spread has to happen.

In 1999 Bruce Bagemihl published Biological Exuberance, cataloguing homosexual and bisexual behaviour in more than 450 species. Four years later it was cited in amici to the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, the case that struck down the sodomy laws. It helped. People stopped being arrested.

And it is still the wrong argument, and I want to be exact about why, because “it worked” is a serious counter-argument and deserves better than a slogan.

The argument runs: this occurs in nature, therefore it is permissible. Grant that and you have handed over the premise, not just the conclusion — you have agreed that occurring in nature is what makes a thing permissible. Which means the same sentence, in the same shape, licenses everything else that occurs in nature.

So, frankly, and this is why the frankness matters: bed bugs reproduce by traumatic insemination, the male piercing the female’s abdominal wall and injecting sperm into the body cavity. Male anglerfish of some species fuse permanently to the female, their tissues merging, their organs degenerating, until they are a pair of gonads attached to her bloodstream. Male mallards coerce females routinely and injuriously. Infanticide by incoming males is standard across langurs and lions.

None of that is an argument against queerness, and none of it is an argument for coercion. That is the point: nature is not making arguments. It is not a legislature, a scripture, or a character witness. It has no opinion about whom you love, and the reason it has no opinion is that it has no opinions.

The trap has always run both directions, which is how we got here. “Unnatural” was the accusation for four centuries. Answering it with “actually it is natural” wins the round and concedes the court — and a court that can acquit on those grounds can convict on them. This is the same defect this project already refuses in its own masthead: we do not say the universe loves you for your star stuff, because for it makes the atoms into a reason. Down to is not because of. It measures how far the loving reaches, never why it was given.

If the wrasse does not authorise me, what have I got? Something narrower than permission, and much harder to take away.

Every claim about how bodies and desires must work smuggles in a hidden universal — there is one arrangement, it is the two-sex reproductive pair, and it is what life is. That is not a moral claim. It is a claim about the world, and claims about the world can be checked.

It fails. Not at the margins, not in a handful of oddities kept in a cabinet, but everywhere anyone has looked with any care. A fish rewrites its gonads in ten days. A fungus runs twenty-three thousand mating types. An alga has no sperm and no egg. A father grows a placenta and pays for it with his immune system. Thirty-one per cent of Laysan albatross pairs at one Oahu colony were two females, raising chicks. All-female whiptail lizards court each other, and the courtship raises the egg count.

This is the difference-first move this collection keeps arriving at from other directions — No. 11 arguing that variation is the ground state rather than the exception, No. 8 that a monoculture is one blight from collapse. Difference is not what happens to the norm. There was never a norm; there was a common case, mistaken for a law.

So the animals owe us nothing, and they have already given us the only thing that was ever needed: they took the word unnatural and left it with no referent. What is left after that is not a permission slip. It is a cleared space. What goes in it is ours to decide, on the grounds we actually care about — consent, tenderness, honesty, who gets hurt — none of which any fish has an opinion on either.

The boy with the aquarium had no words. Every one of the things he was shamed for now has a name, an identity, a community and support — and the names were not given to us. We made them.

Pansexual. Polyamorous. Autigender. Neuroqueer. Two of those we have written about at length already and this zine is not going to re-argue them: the case is at Autigender and Neuroqueer on stimpunks.org. What belongs here is where the words came from, because that turns out to be part of the same argument.

Neuroqueer was coined by Nick Walker, independently by Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon, with Remi Yergeau’s work arriving alongside; Walker’s Neuroqueer Heresies (2021) is where it is set out. It is a verb before it is an identity — something you do to the assumption that there is one correct way to be a person.

Autigender has a harder provenance, and the difficulty is the finding. It names a relationship with gender rather than a gender: that being Autistic changes how you can perceive a social construct, which gender is. The definition most often quoted comes from a Candidly Autistic post of 2017, preserved in a web archive. The coinage is generally traced to two Tumblr accounts posting through mogai-archive in August 2014, and the primary posts are gone.

Every other attribution in this zine can be traced to a journal with a DOI or a book with an ISBN. This one cannot, because we were not the sort of people whose records anyone was keeping. We are logging it as unsourced rather than laundering it into a citation, and we are saying plainly why it is unsourced, which is a different thing from doubting it.

One honest open question, and it stays open. There are well-documented, repeatedly replicated elevated rates of gay, bi, trans, ace and genderqueer identity among Autistic people. Nobody knows why. It may be something about how we are built; it may be that we are simply less able, or less willing, to absorb a norm we were never fluent in. Both readings are live and we are not picking one — and the answer changes nothing about whether any of it is all right, which was never a question biology got a vote on.

This is the most quotable material this project has ever handled and the easiest to turn into something false. So:

Why the first refusal is first. Because it is the one I would have made, at ten, at twenty, and in most arguments since — and because it is the argument that worked, in a real court, for real people who stopped being prosecuted. Refusing an argument that succeeded is harder than refusing a bad one, and we are doing it anyway, on the grounds that a defence which depends on nature’s testimony is only ever on loan from whoever gets to call the witness.