I bet some poor actual scientists at Kew were approached to provide these examples of "queer", bisexual, pansexual etc organisms and rolled their eyes but had to do it for fear of being ostracised.
^This. The fear and compulsion. The not listening to the factual objections of staff and many of the members of the public who will want to see accuracy from scientific institutions.
Inclusivity and accessibility of their public benefit is what they should be demonstrating, across all the protected characteristics. What a terrible, anti democratic, anti truth, corrupting statement it is, when authoritative organisations start to sell out their organisation’s own core values for a political position that doesn’t respect all human rights equally.
A venerable scientific institution promoting anti science politics in order to project human attributes or intentions on to plants, who most definitely do not share those, as all botanists and scientists know full well, shows a craven, poorly led, captured institution
How does all that make LGB botanists and scientists, and female botanists and scientists, or visitors to Kew, or future sponsors, feel?
Poorly led institutions who would sell out the whole institution’s values, in favour of placing specific sexist misogynist homophobic politics at an untouchable unquestionable elevation, by politically sanctifying, ‘gender identity’ which isn’t even a legally protected characteristic, show themselves to be adopting unfairness and irrationality as a core vale instead.
Do these bodies really want to be stating corporately that don’t consider everyone including women and LGB people to be equal, and that they don’t care about the consequences of that for the public, their employees and anyone else they deal with?
Doing that might get a few more ££££ in from the funders who want to support gender identity. But these captured institutions are risking many many more £££££ in lawsuits and financial losses if they follow the political logic all the way through and start acting outside the law. I just don’t know why bosses or trustees of public bodies like this are allowed to dabble in such risky and morally questionable politics?
LGB plantswomen and plantsmen in social history and today across the world as an exhibition theme, would be great.
Gender identity examples from plants or anthropomorphising human sexual orientations on to plants - it’s just nonsense that should never have got further than the desk of the corporate sponsorship manager.