Oh Kew, not you too.......

[menopausalmare]

🙄

Absurd.

Hopefully Kew Gardens will start putting pronouns after the plant names.

Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) She/Her.

I am also old enough to remember the turnstiles that you put the penny in. But I am choosing to identify as someone much younger.

😂Brilliant!

Extremely absurd. Plants and fungi have been on Earth far longer than humans and their biological characteristics have nothing to do with human tradition.

This is like a parody in a comedy show. I’d been wondering what was going to be queered next but wasn’t expecting this.

It’s all completely performative. Nobody who studies and curates plant collections believes that plants are “queer”.

Goodness, you're right, they are pansies (I have a pretty brown thumb myself so didn't recognise).
That is in such extraordinarily poor taste. I'm flabbergasted.

"Queering Nature" is the new version of "Lysenko-ing Nature" - but this time, this time, it's definitely the Right Side of History, just wait and see...

</sarcasm>

If I wanted to be fair, I could say that plants and fungi do have interesting ways of crossbreeding and speciating (e.g. haplodiploid life cycles, hundreds of mating types in some fungi, polyploidy in domestic wheat), which would be considered "unconventional" within the animal kingdom.

But it would be awfully human-centric 21st-century-centric Anglo-centric colonialistic behaviour to paint these biological realities in Queer colours; perhaps it's one of those irregular verbs only available to TRSOH

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

point one valid
point two it's is nothing atall to do with that.

I guess they could use a better word but the way this post was done appears to have attracted the worse form of comment .

It's actually really interesting to consider the movement of plants as part of colonialism and also the effects on native habitats and peoples. Sugar is the obvious example, but also rubber, grapes, tea, coffee, spices and chocolate. Colonial expansion brought potatoes and tomatoes to the West. Then there are the 'plant crazes' for non-native species such as pineapples and different flowers and so on. I have a food atlas somewhere and it is fascinating.

The move to decolonise wasn't about sending the plants back -it was about linking them to the history and process of colonisation. I don't see anything wrong with this - in fact I'd support it.

I went off James Wong when he flounced out of his job with the Observer because they had started interrogating the whole trans thing.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4750640-james-wong-quits-the-observer

"How I feel in myself has no bearing on what someone feels. If someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels female - I cannot tell her she is ‘wrong’. Would you?"

Yes, I would, Alice, and so would you if you understood that it's not kind to lie to people, both for them and for others.

I went off James Wong when he flounced out of his job with the Observer because they had started interrogating the whole trans thing.

Oh yes 🙄

I don't see what the issue with this is.

It's tedious virtue signalling.

Not everything needs to be "queered".

This isn't TV drama where it's important for different minority groups to see themselves represented. These are plants.

And also, many gay people see "queer" as a slur.

It's pushing the envelope. I can see a similar exhibition about women and plants being relevant because botany was an 'acceptable' feminine pursuit in the 18th and 19th centuries and many women also painted/drew quite exquisite botanical art (again this was an acceptable pursuit). Yet women were barred from the RS as Beatrix Potter found out when she tried to present her study of fungi. Women were also acknowledged to be herbalists and to use plants in medicine and household cleaning as well as fabric dying.

But there are no real links to queer - whatever that is.

Queer can only exist in a framework that sets a rigid definition of what non-queer is, and to a great extent it is something that could only ever have applied to privileged, semi leisured people. Most of our ancestors had to work too darned hard to earn a living and to build and support a protective social network (usually aka families) to have 'identities'.

@YetAnotherSpartacus

exactly

It's so depressing. I used to like both of them.

At least at RHS Wisley, with its ramps everywhere, park of mobility scooters, toilets which are fully equipped for disabled adults including hoists and changing tables, high chairs and kids' menus, and baby changing facilities in both the women's and men's toilets, they have already demonstrated that they are willing to put actual money where their mouths are in terms of accessibility and inclusion.

It's actually really interesting to consider the movement of plants as part of colonialism and also the effects on native habitats and peoples. Sugar is the obvious example, but also rubber, grapes, tea, coffee, spices and chocolate.
Yes!
I'd make sure to include western Europeans among the peoples whose world has been changed by the importation of plants.
And it would be great to point out the differences among plant reproduction (what bisexual means I relation to plants, what dioecious and monoecious mean) and that, in contrast to plants, all mammals are dioecious.

I'm mortified for them.

I took my children to an aquarium over the summer, and there was a whole section about queer sealife. The only thing they could come up with was tropical fish that were the same colour as the bisexual flag. As a bisexual myself, I'm not sure how I was supposed to feel about it...

I took my children to an aquarium over the summer, and there was a whole section about queer sealife. The only thing they could come up with was tropical fish that were the same colour as the bisexual flag.

that's hilarious

They're getting ratio'd on Twitter.

Oh how embarrassing..cringe.....