And then they came for the teddy bears

[Hoardasurass]

So the arts council has funded an exhibition by culture leicestershire that claims some care bears are trans. They're teddies ffs. When will this crap end 🤬

Gift token for the article
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/4038ff473ba22d6a

Well, look at that. Some cursory googling has revealed that humans can determine the sex of fish by turning them over and examining the size and hue of their genital openings or "vents". The females have larger vents, because their vents have to be wide enough to allow the exit of eggs, which are bigger than sperm. I hope we all knew that egg cells are bigger than sperm cells, even if the folks at the arts group don't.

We're done here, I think. It's safe to conclude that female mermaids will also need a significantly wider vent to lay their eggs, than the mermen would need to emit sperm!
I think we can therefore also safely conclude that mermaids and mermen will be aware of that visual difference.

One of the questions I am most commonly asked is how to determine the sex of fish. The only positive way to determine the sex of sexually monomorphic species (males and females look similar) is by examination of the vent. This practice is commonly referred to as venting. What is the vent and where is it? The vent is the opening between the anus and the anal fin where the fish will excrete either eggs or sperm. The vent is also referred to as the genital papilla. For females the term ovipositor (egg tube) also refers to the vent.

www.fishhead.com/articles/ventsex.htm

There is add problem of fish scales v cetacean swimming motion in mermaid depictions. If their lower half is that of a fish they should swim by moving their tails left/right but they are usually shown moving it up/down like a marine mammal. But if they are mammals they shouldn't have scales. So before we worry about how to sex a fish we first have to worry about whether mermaids are fish at all.

Mermaids are the ones whose voices have been taken away.

Mermen spend 99% of the time comparing the size of their tridents.

I've often pondered the paradoxical tail flapping of merpeople. They're definitely fish though, all vertebrates are fish

https://theconversation.com/the-absurdity-of-natural-history-or-why-humans-are-fish-69384

This means, for example, there can be no definition of fish that does not include everything that evolved from fish. Following this logic you could argue that as amphibians evolved from fish, amphibians are fish. Mammals evolved from animals that evolved from amphibians, so mammals are fish. We are fish.

Eta. but not clown fish.

Hasn't it already been established that there is no such thing as a fish?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish

Depends on how you look at it. Some hold 'everything is fish' others that 'nothing is fish'. They'll probably be a war.

How do they piss?

I am not forgiving this gang of twerpies for "genitalia is not visible". Genitalia are plural, fatheads, a poncy way to say "genitals". You can be as completely wrongheaded as you like about mermaids, which, like fish, don't exist anyway, but stop messing with grammar in the process.

Where do the nothing is a fish folk stand on things that identify as fish? Who are they do dismiss their inner sense of fishness?

Silverfish are fish!

I do keep finding them in the bath....

There you go then. I rest my case.

Ay, caramba!

It gets more complicated: by this logic, Judy Bennett, who played Shula in The Archers for several decades, is trans because she voiced several male Archers children when they were too young to have actors of their own. And Carole Boyd (Lynda Snell) voiced Julian Clifton, Bill Thompson, Tom Pottage and Charlie Pringle in series 2 of Postman Pat, so she must be trans as well.

I think Ash from the Pokemon cartoons is also trans.

Oh Christ - lets not bring Postman Pat into this - I've not recovered from that thread yet...

sorreeeeeeeeeeeeee

Ash is gay; no trans in that rainbow.

OK, everyone, take off your Sonichu medallions and let children's cartoons be children's cartoons.

Whom was it that Brock most liked: the Nurses Joy or the Officers Jenny?

FFS! They're bloody stuffed toys!

By the way, does that make Ethel Merman twans?

In the original Japanese anime, Zoltar (Battle of the Planets) actually was trans.

Or possibly intersex, NB or gender fluid - s/he predates the labels. Definitely written to be both male and female though.

I can just imagine the sniff at someone telling Lynda that she's actually a man

Dare one ask what The Postman Pat Incident was...?

Oh, and as for transing historical figures, let's not forget the 'queering' of Mary Anning in Ammonite. There was absolutely no evidence that she was gay - not that it would have been remotely an issue today if she was, but the idea of assigning someone a sexuality that they might genuinely have been horrified by had they been around to see it, I find quite offensive.

IIRC, the director indicated that queering people was 'righting wrongs because gay people had been 'straightened' in the past' or some such tosh. Her descendants objected but presumably the director didn't give a shit about that because it interfered with his 'artistic vision'

If we're talking anime characters, is this where I confess that as a tiny 4yo kid, I was absolutely fascinated by Minos and Minas in, er - checks Google - Grandizer? Goldorak in French. A male character with a female one inside his head? Yeah, that spoke to me for some reason 😛

I think the original anime (which I'd love to have seen) was called Gatchaman. I had a thing for Jason, brooding bad boy <swoon>. I think he died in the original.

Princess was one of the reasons I always wanted to ride a motorbike - more than that - that I realised it was possible for girls to ride a motorbike, because I'd never seen anyone but men on them before.

Princess, then, there was a TV show called Chocky, and the lead character in that had some really weird little motor bike (more pushbike with a motor) - she was another hero.

Of course George (although she was also a jerk, and Anne was the one I really thought was worth knowing)

I find transing kids TV characters pretty offensive actually - just let them be non-conforming (not that conformity should matter when you're a magic stuffed toy)