🐠 Daily Fish Fact: 🐠
The Snowflake Moray Eel, along with other species of morays, have pharyngeal jaws, which are a second set of jaws located in the throat or pharynx. This species is an unconfirmed hermaphrodite, but there have been records that they are able to change sex during their lifetime. Snowflake morays are also scale-less, secreting a mucus over their skin that allows for easy maneuverability in and around holes in their environment.
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Minoru Nakahara (1893-1990)—Hermaphrodite of Nature [oil, canvas, 1947]
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Happy Intersex awareness day!
I found this a bit ago, but here is the entire collection of Hermaphrodites With Attitude, an intersex newsletter that ran starting in 1994 until 2005.
The newsletter features intersex people from all over talking about their lives. There is a lot focused on the medical treatment of intersex people at the time, but there is also information about rallies and protests, news, and people talking about their lives!
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Hi, u said ur Intersex. If i may ask, Do u prefer the word Hermaphrodite cuz of it being beautiful sounding n the story behind it or the more recent n biological "Intersex" ?
I would never use the Hermaphrodite label for myself, and the community term is Intersex.
As a rule you should always use intersex unless a person prefers another term such as hermaphrodite, or you are in a space where hermaphrodite or another term is the preferred term (example, if you're at a group called "hermaphrodite action council" where hermaphrodite is the accepted group norm *made the name up off the top of my head*)
The story behind the term hermaphrodite also isn't particularly beautiful, the god Hermaphroditus was worshipped as a being of inbetween spaces, agriculture etc, but the Greeks that worshipped hermaphroditus would also leave us (intersex infants) on hillsides to die of exposure or predators. Not to mention the modern historical violence in the word.
The real beauty in the word to me is us, the people, and what we did with it, the battles we won under the banner of "hermaphrodite". It is powerful, and like many painful words, there is power in it, and therefore power in reclaiming it.
Hermaphrodites with Attitude, Boston- 1996
However for me, I don't feel comfortable with the term for myself. A glimpse of my experience.... I was a little queer "girl" with a micropenis at swimming training, my HRT was changed at 12, and suddenly my body did some things it had never done before.... Children are very cruel and that word followed me all the way to adulthood.
Intersex describes a community umbrella that I fit under, but the word I actually identify with is אנדרוגינוס (androgynos), a term unique to Judaism which does not perfectly correspond with western notions of sex or gender. If we were to discuss cultural stories that we find beautiful, I find meaning in a midrash where Adam is created male and female and HaShem takes Adams female side to create Eve.
Tldr: use intersex unless told another term is situationally more appropriate.
Edit: because somebody previously asked the question. Hermaphrodite is not an offensive word to use in referring to non-human animals, where it refers to a specific reproductive strategy... this does not correlate with human intersex experience.
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“A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted / Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion”
Lines from the poem Sonnet 20 by William Shakespeare (1609) one of his texts most noted for the theme of sexual ambiguity, and the sculpture Sleeping Hermaphroditus, an Imperial Roman copy of a Hellenistic original by Polycles (circa. 155 BC) rediscovered during the early 1600s and subsequently accented with a marble pillow sculpted by Bernini in 1620; now housed in The Louvre, Paris.
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"WhY ShOuLd InTerseX PeOple Be In The Acronym"
Well, for one thing, "preventing lesbianism" is still a reason why doctors do clitorectomies on newborns.
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🐠 Daily Fish Fact: 🐠
The Asian Sheepshead Wrasse is one of the largest species of wrasse, native to the western Pacific Ocean. It is a hermaphroditic species, meaning that it has both male and female organs which allows it to change its sex. All Sheepshead are born female and as they grow older, eventually will change sex.
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