My gender is cactus.

[rax]

A while back I complained about wanting to replace my gender with a set of outward-facing spikes. I've been feeling prickly, wanting the space between me and other people to be delineated and defended, and some of that prickliness has been about gender. I've also been bonding with the desert, and spending time (though not as much as I'd like) among cacti and thorny trees and tiny flowers and birds and lizards. And I realized that... actually cactus works way better than male or female as a gender for me. It's a little tongue in cheek, but I mean, look at this. Cacti:

• care more about sunlight and water and safety than appearances, but still blossom in (bright pink, for many species) flowers when they feel like it
• are covered in spines to protect them from being consumed, but need the touch of the animals that know how to interact with them safely (particularly but not only for reproduction)
• won't hurt you if you don't hurt them!
• move between periods of relative stasis and calm and very sudden changes in shape and size depending on the resources available to them
• are perfectly comfortable when birds nest in them --- sometimes literally inside them, in the case of cacti like the saguaro --- and keep those new spaces opened up in them for other animals to live in when the first occupants move out
• over time, develop patches that are smoother and safe to touch, but only for those who take the time to tell the difference
• are simple in construction yet labyrinthine on the inside (seriously, look at this blog post I found, unless you are one of those people squicked by fractal structures full of holes, in which case NEVER LOOK INSIDE A CACTUS)

Seriously though, doesn't that make sense? This makes so much more sense to express my social and sexual relations than the gender binary I'm expected to be using. To be clear, I don't identify as a cactus --- if nothing else, I travel far too much --- but I find it a very useful metaphor, so I'm rolling with it. (Normally I wouldn't feel the need to be explicit about something like that, but since I am a fox and saying that isn't really any more believable than claiming cactushood, I figure it's best to be clear.) When I finally get whiskers, I can call them my thorns, too. =^_^=

Randomly: I made a comment about this at Anthrocon, and "#gendercactus" briefly became a twitter meme among bronies, though it appears to be out of Twitter's search cache at this point so I guess it didn't have staying power. Zury joked that I had managed to hit zero-day appropriation.

Comments

[damerell]

My sister sat on a cactus once. Most unfortunate.

[frameacloud]

Reminds me. A burglary attempt in my great-grandmother's house was foiled by cacti. The burglar had the misfortune to climb in the window that had a table full of her potted cactus collection under it. He made so much noise that everybody woke up, and he went right back outside again. We still have one of the original guard cacti from that incident. Long-lived thing, it's probably over a hundred years old now.

Feng shui says that spiky plants such as cacti have dangerous chi and shouldn't be allowed in a home, but this anecdote demonstrates that dangerous chi is useful for protection.