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franz kafka does his work lying on bed like schoolgirl - animated adaptation of that one meme that circulated the internet... / september 2024.

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.

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'The Night Gardener' by Eric Fan

take life a little less seriously. learn a skill that isn’t resume-friendly. own your decisions without punishing yourself. both above average and average results are great; it’s good to do something at all. do many things, do many things badly. think about the big picture. the time is passing, regardless

'Germania', Artist : Friedrich August von Kaulbach, 1920.