ext_120469 ([identity profile] oceanstater.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] rax 2010-09-07 04:47 am (UTC)

I'm enjoying your class notes (the parts I can understand), although I'm wary of both misinterpreting what I think I understand and commenting, because I might be using a colloquial English word or phrase that academics have defined as having a specific, possibly significantly different meaning. (And God forbid I use the wrong semantics and someone jumps in to ~EDUCATE~ me.)

I have some thoughts that I am foolishly going to share anyhow. :) While I'm guessing that your transsomatechnics class surveys the history of the field, a lot of the authors you cite sound... awfully regressive and old-fashioned? The menstruation-focused nonsense, etc.

As a "lay genderhead" (great phrase if you coined that!) I thought that the distinction between sex and gender was increasingly common, even amongst people who are not genderheads. Is it possible to use the human sense of gender for a non-human being? Confusing the issue is that fact that sex and gender are still used as interchangeable terms, which makes Wikipedia's article on dichogamy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichogamy) amusing to me.

Well, if we get to use terms from biology, how about one of my favorites: polygamodioecious. :) It's a word from botany that mean that a species is mostly dioecious (having separate male and female individuals), but with some individuals being monoecious and possessing both male and female flowers. True fax: the state tree of Rhode Island is polygamodioecious!

Plant sexuality is way more interesting than animal sexuality.

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