Theinfinityarchivist - The ♾️ Archivist

the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.

if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.

Dear fiction writers there is no such thing as an "intersex species", please stop telling me that your alien species is intersex rep.

That's not what intersex means. If your reasoning for a character being intersex is "they're a [insert species that has different sex characteristics from humans]", just stop.

If "all of them are intersex" then they aren't intersex. They just have different sex traits/reproductive organization from humans. If thats how they typically look, thats just what being perisex (non-intersex) looks like for that species. Intersex refers to an individual with sex characteristics atypical for their species.

This also goes for third sexes. That's not atypical if it's a commonly observed cluster of traits recognized as "a sex", that means that'd just be another form of being perisex (for that species). Intersex essentially means 'other' or 'neither', the point of the word is that we don't fit into the boxes provided for most of the population, not that we're a rare and magical third box.

Additionally shapeshifters (usually) also come off as bad rep for the same reason. If your character is intersex because they're a shapeshifter, they're not intersex. You don't become intersex, you're born that way. I don't like when characters have their bodies altered later in life and are called intersex for those modifications. And the idea that a character is becoming intersex by transforming their body just reinforces the idea that there is a certain type of way an intersex body looks, and that intersex is something you can 'become' via bodily alterations. We can look like anything. Sometimes our variations are only visible through chromosome or hormone testing. And often we have our bodies changed against our will to make our intersexuality less obvious. If you can become intersex via body alterations, does that mean medical abuse removes our intersexuality?

Yes, you can have a non-human character be intersex‐ if that individual has variant sex characteristics by the standards of their species.

Yes, you can write a species with bigenitalia (both parts)- just don't call them intersex or hermaphrodites (that is a slur). Some better terms are cosexed, monoecious, gonosimulites, dualsex

Yes, you can write shapeshifters as intersex- as long as you understand what intersex means and apply the actual definition of the word to the context of your story.

Andrei Rublev (1966), dir. Andrei Tarkovsky

sorry i didn’t text back i was busy thinking about nothing for 5 hours straight

Loket Castle, Loket, Karlovy Vary Region, Czech Republic

I was working on some other tasks and somehow landed on the animal figurine side of JSTOR (don't tell my manager).

May I offer you three conspiring jerboa figurines from the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Oath

Please stop discrediting your ancestors' ability to tell stories by trying to find material/physical origins to their stories. Krampus isn't a cryptid, dragon stories weren't inspired by dinosaur fossils, every region has its own mythology and fae are only a thing in Celtic, English, and English-colonized regions, your ancestors were perfectly capable of doing things without help from aliens, and our world is weird enough that tales of mysterious strangers, mass disappearances, memories not lining up, and so on, are better explained as a product of OUR world than hypothetical other worlds/timelines. A lot of weird tales were spun by storytellers. Give some respect to their hard work.