Meet Blob. They have 720 sexes!

If you still believe there are only two biological sexes, you have not met Blob. 

Blob has no brain, but can nevertheless solve complex problems. They can heal themselves in two minutes if cut in half and can move around in spite of having no legs or wings.

This slime mold (physarum polycephalum) has around 720 different sexes, which – I am sure – will annoy more than a few religious fundamentalists and transphobes out there. 

The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie, starring  Steve McQueen.

CNN has more.

Photo from Reuters.

Baroque Gender Stories

Vivica Genaux & Lawrence Zazzo, and the Lautten Compagney of Berlin have made a whole album for baroque music with gender non-conforming themes.

In the 17th and 18th centuries it was common practice on the opera stage for women to sing in trousers. Castrati (men who were castrated in order to develop their special mezzo-soprano voices)  took on the roles of  queens or princesses. 

The album contains arias, duets and baroque opera pieces by composers like George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), Johann Adolf Hasse (1699-1783), Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1785), Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) and Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715-1777).

There are five different versions of Siroe on this album, an opera about a Persian crossdressing princess.

The song linked to above is about the time the Greek hero Achilles had to go into hiding, dressing up as a woman and learning to weave. Those who have seen Gentleman Jack, the TV series about the 19th century transmasculine lesbian Anne Lister, should know that she often referred to the story about Achilles in order to find out if other women loved women the in the way she did. If they understood the reference, they were in. LGBTQ people used history and art to develop a vocabulary they could use to understand themselves and each other.

CDL has more about this baroque gender variance album.

Dorian Electra: ‘I’m not a woman dressing as a man. It’s more complex’

Dorian Electra, FTM gender-fluid pop artist, has been interviewed by the Guardian about their new album Flamboyant.

She says that her transmasculine image was partly influenced by artists like David Bowie, Bono (!), Liberace, Prince, and Austin Powers. 

As a kid, they felt “really androgynous”:

“I wasn’t into the things girls were into, but I hated sports, or playing with GI Joe. I always identified with the word kid more than girl or boy.” In high school, they would have crushes on boys, “but I didn’t feel like a girl liking a guy. Love stories in movies were very alienating to me.”

Dorian does not define  as a drag king:

“I’m not a woman dressing as a man, it’s so much more complex than that” – nor do they feel like a man all the time. “When I came across ‘gender fluid’, I was like: that term actually really resonates with me,” they say. “But the core of my being is not gendered at all – even ‘gender fluid’ is a form of identity that can put somebody in a box.” 

They say culture is currently at a moment of admitting: “Hey, there are many boxes. And then eventually, if humanity survives, it’ll be like: actually, we don’t need these boxes any more. I do think that the labels are incredibly empowering though, and for people to fight just to be in the other box as male and female, as a trans person, is still enormous.”

On July 17 Dorian releases their debut album, Flamboyant. To Billboard they say that they are trying to reclaim ‘flamboyant’ as a positive thing:

“It’s been used as a derogatory term – a coded word for homosexual, queer, effiminate – and obvious as opposed to secretive, which is what you’re supposed to be in a society that doesn’t embrace you… Then, people started talking about it as something colorful or flame-like that you couldn’t look away from. ”

As for the new music, Dorian says:

“I would say that the album draws a lot of sounds from everything from Baroque music- like a lot of harps and chords- to heavy metal with guitars and futuristic metallic drums.”

Victorian crossdressing

Transgender and gender non-conforming people have crossdressed for centuries, as this is one way they can explore and express their gender variance.

James Gardiner’s Victorian  Collection consists of  35 cartes de visite  (ca. 8 x 5 cm photographs) presented in a 19th century photograph album depicting private and theatrical crossdressing, mostly from the 1860s and 1870s. 

We do not know the real gender identity of these people, but it easy to see that many of them loved presenting this side of themselves to the world.

Academic claims she’s discovered anal suppository ‘cure’ for homosexuality and gender variance

Gay Star News has the story about an amazing scientific breakthrough. A Kuwaiti academic, Mariam Al-Sohel, claims she discovered an anal suppository ‘cure’ for homosexuality.

‘I discovered therapeutic suppositories that curb the sexual urges of boys of the third gender,’ she said. ‘As well as the fourth gender, which is butch lesbians.’

The ‘third gender’ is feminine gay men, according to Al-Sohel.

She then continued: ‘This is all science, so there’s nothing to be ashamed of.

‘The sexual urge develops when a person is sexually attacked. And afterwards it persists because there is an anal worm that feeds on semen. It feeds on sperm.

‘So what I did was to produce suppositories, which are to be used by certain people at a certain time. It cures those urges by exterminating the worm that feeds on sperm,’ she said.

The ingredients are exactly the same for men and women, but they’re in different colors.

I am pretty sure Dr. Mariam Al-Sohel has been infected by the dangerous brain eating worm, Lumbricus Loboticum, pictured below. It has a very sciency name, so this must be true.