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krispy-k-bacon · 4 months ago

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edgar walks

a bitter, struggling mage is pushed to make a decision

(from the substack)

Despite everything else in me telling me not to I rush out of my room, into the dark street, my haste further dimming my sight. Here I am, making my way to the lake with midnight approaching. I tried not to let the rumors get to me, but I couldn’t-- they wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it.

“Oh, hey Edgar! I heard a rumor about a new spirit forming at the pond by Austin’s!” one would chirp, fists full of dumbass Magi El Impartial zines. “Did you hear? This spirit apparently grants wishes” another would insist, eyeing me… anticipating a reaction.

This is so stupid.

I had zero reason to consider such a thing, spirits never give you something-- but here I am anyway, entertaining the rumors stirred up by the fucking alt-magi crowd.

My legs shuffle through the cracked concrete, guided by nothing but my memory of the path forward. This is stupid. I repeat to myself, despite this repeated affirmation, my legs move onward. My rushed wandering leads me to lose track. I power-walk through some splits in the main road. My fingers hastily attempt tracing a glyph to give me some light-- nothing. It dark enough as it is, and I still can’t trace a fucking luz glyph. The jutted concrete beneath my feet slowly transforms to grass as I continue to wander, suburban hums slowly being replaced with the familiar whispers of insects and my bubbling skepticism. Step-by-step, the connecting of shoe-to-path beneath me just to barely beat louder than my thoughts, I make my way to the foot of the lake.

I gaze out into the lake seeking comfort, soon to face the familiar posture of the library-- it stands at the far side, glowing from below. A comforting sight to see, a monolith of knowledge illuminated in juxtaposition to the surrounding dark of my suburban annoyance as to observe and further chastise me in my pursuit for proof of playground-talk.

Here I am… the thought lingers.

All that’s worth doing now is to just wait.

So I stand… and wait….

and so I stand...

And I wait...

. . .

The general chit-chat of the night-owl cicadas and accompanying crickets slowly grow to the pitch of mockings of a grade school crowd. They do nothing to quell my percolating regrets.

“For fucks sake,” I wonder, “Why did I bring myself out here?”

A stupid rumor, pedaled by shortcut-seekers... and I had to go and get caught in the whims of a wish that could actually be granted-- if only.

Maybe if it were true, what would I have asked it anyway?

“Hello, spirit we still barely have any conception of, I wish to be a competent mage,” I begin pacing around, my grip of my mental anchor slowly slipping.

“Perhaps, if you may, I wish to better comprehend the mechanics to magic?”

The continued chatter of the insects at the foot of the pond grow in intensity, I can hear their making-fun crystal clear.

“I wish for magic to not be so confined to social narrative,” the anchor slips off completely, “or maybe for people to shut the fuck up about my hair??"

This chatter is fucking deafening, why are they paying such close attention to me?

"And maybe even not talk about how curly or effeminate it is? To not get called ‘queen’ by some idiots who only heard that word from the internet. I wish people didn’t ask me what Ed was short for-- let alone giving me their ten hundred thousand stupid attempts at guessing what its short for.”

“God, I wish that I was a real--”

The mockery and collective gossip of the insects grow to a fever pitch, near unanimous laughter directed at me-- I can’t think over this fucking racket. I stumble over to a stone and lob it over in the vague direction of the noise’s source, my movements barely mimicking their own. I stand still, breath held, waiting for the stone to make contact with water-- it never comes.

“What?”

I look outward toward the lake, the insect’s incessant laughter going mute. What the fuck?

The stone isn’t anywhere near where I threw it, I scuttle around trying to find it until my eyes lock with a branch baring its grip firmly around the stone.

Its limbs pierced out from the lake’s still, calm mirror... Branches splitting and coiling into and throughout each other as it accumulates into a cluster of branches and leaves to form its head. A small, yellow eye pierces through its veil of brambled twigs...

“Are you…” I quiver, “Are you the spirit?” I shuffle back, feet weighed down by the spirit’s glare. Branches groan as my focus is drawn to the spirits side, the rock I had thrown joining the reflection of the lake, the silence that followed was deafening.

“Is it true that you grant wishes?” The silence screams into the depths of my head, only to be met with the twitches of wood. “Uhm… can you even grant wishes?”

The creaks groan further above the water, what’s this thing’s deal?

“I don’t know if you had heard-- if you’re even aware at all, that is-- but I came to you because you could grant wishes.”

The creaking continues, the branch-amalgam beckoning toward the shore.

I continue to observe, the lone beam looking past me-- unrelenting in its stillness.

“From what I understand, you types tend to bargain with something when people want to ‘get’ something out of you.”

…

I shuffle around, sizing up the spirit to further infer any response. “I was wondering if you could… uh…” my thoughts flee, I never considered what would happen if the spirit actually happened to be real. The thought of my wish was slowly drifting apart, becoming less clear with the creaks of the spirit. The spirit continues to idle, my confusion ever-stirring, you’d think a wish-granting spirit would be capable of speech instead of acting like a houseplant.

“Do you even understand me?”

The branches creek loudly as they twitch above the waters, the wind whistles its taunt through the legs of the spirit.

“I wish to be a competent mage,” I croak.

…

Nothing.

“I wish for my studies to actually match my magical capability.”

…

The wind continues its whistling jaunt, not a peep from the spirit. The collection of branches staring right through me, ever indulgent in its wooden posture. I let out a deep sigh, and sit by the lake.

“Fuck, man,” all this lip I give about the shortcut-seekers, and here I am-- staring down a barely conscious bundle of twigs and branches looking for a fucking shortcut.

The air skates along the lake, its humming serving as a polite backdrop for the insects to continue their rumorings around me while I sit scant adjacent to the lake spirit, letting the minutes melt into each other. The spirit holds its position, barely indicating it’s sentience through its sporadic twitches, I feel like I’ve seen its eye blink?? It’s difficult to tell, the rumors about you coming from the insects make it harder to stay focused on the spirit.

My rapid consideration is cut short from the abrupt whistling coming from the lake’s spirit, calling to me-- my eyes shoot up, yanking me from of my trance.

“What???”

The insects around seem to have been caught off guard too, standing around and about in shock that the spirit had whistled a tune. It’s not moving anything to speak, its song barely resembles speech-- yet I can understand it. The spirit finishes its call, beckoning a response from the crowd.

“For what??? I’ve been committed to this study long enough as it is, it makes no sense that I still can’t do any applied casting.”

The whistle begins to pitch up once more, its reedy inquisitiveness teasing me, an idle melody eluding the crowd while further confounding me. I don’t know what I have to consider… but the spirit reiterates its tune, capitulating into a semi-conclusive period. The spirit probably knows that these aren’t necessarily affirming words it’s singing to me.

...

“But…”

I stand, shocked at its capability for its song. The wind feels at the spirit’s command now, free to conduct a piece through itself to consider the wishes of whoever encounters it. Its eye continues to pierce through the interior of its bramble of woven twigs and jutted branches, its intent directed straight at me.

“Consider…” my legs shuffle around, idle-pacing over the intent of the spirit’s song. “Consider, consider…” maybe others have sought out the spirit and chose to make a wish, but had otherwise become clung onto… maybe it was never given a human audience to hear its song? My pacing continues, wondering what the spirit would mean for me to “consider”, the insects blooming discussions fade into the air while I walk.

“Consider…”

The spirit continues its singing, a spritely tune to accompany the wind that dances.

“Consider….” I continue to pace with some dance to my step, to further accompany the spirit’s lovely song, keeping in time with the ballroom of insects beside me.

“Consider…”

…

The song carries on a call and response from the insects to the spirit, and from the spirit to the wind. I let the them push my step to a dance around the foot of the lake, joining with the ensemble of insects to consider the musical impulses that the spirit wished to show to us tonight. I’m not paying as much attention to the spirit now, but the light in its bramble feels more inviting now. The song continues, letting its tune whisper into the ends of my mind while I take a sit to watch the spirit finish.

The song soon reaches its conclusion, with the spirit relenting slightly on its wooden posture. I give a light applause for the spirit for their performance. Their song was assuring, and the spirit blinks in confidence of their ability to speak through the choreography of the wind. I get up to dust off the dirt from my pants, and trace a small luz glyph with my hand to light the way home.

#fiction #short story #lgbt #magic #magical realism #urban fantasy #modern #trans

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year ago

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By: Frederick R. Prete

Published: Feb 11, 2024

About the Author

Frederick Prete is a biopsychologist in the Dept. of Biology at Northeastern Illinois University. He teaches courses in neurobiology, and human and animal physiology. He has also served as an associate editor for the International Journal of Comparative Psychology. Prete writes about how people use and misuse biology to support their social and political points of view.

Other essays by Prete can be found on his Substack Everything Is Biology.

The contemporary “debate” (if one can call it that) surrounding the biology of sex suffers from a lack of intellectual seriousness on one side. The arguments forwarded by those insisting on the non-binary nature of sex often demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of basic biology, or are so comically nonsensical that one wonders whether they’re even worth responding to. Academic biologists engaging with gender activists’ arguments for the so-called “sex spectrum” are like mathematicians engaging with numerologists (individuals who believe in a mystical relationship between numbers and coinciding events) or geologists debating Flat Earthers. However, given that sex pseudoscience has somehow taken over academia, serious scholars now find themselves compelled to engage with the absurd.

One such example is the bizarre suggestion that because some fish can literally change sex during their lifetime, then perhaps humans can too. This idea, while absurd on its face, is far from fringe. It has been given credence by popular science outlets like Scientific American, which highlighted the sex-changing abilities of clown fish “to emphasize the diversity of ways in which sexual beings move through the world.” Even the United Kingdom’s national library posted (and later deleted) a thread on X during Pride Month last year about the sex-changing abilities of the Māori wrasse, and Greenpeace made a similar move in 2021.

What relevance does LGBTQ+ Pride Month have to sex-changing fish unless there’s an intention to suggest that these examples illuminate the potential for sex changes in humans? But if activists insist on making such far-fetched comparisons, they should be challenged to follow their logic to its ultimate conclusion.

Let’s be honest, animals do a lot of weird things. They enslave other animals, eat their offspring, cannibalize their lovers, kill their newborn twin sisters, and devour their siblings in the womb. Do any of these activists want to justify slavery or embryonic cannibalism because animals do it? Probably not. But it’s equally silly to claim that we can derive grand lessons about human biology and sexual behavior from animals. Male octopuses, for instance, grab a packet of their own sperm with one of their tentacles, shove inside a female’s mantle cavity, and drop it next to her oviduct. This hardly seems like a behavior humans should try to emulate. Are there any objections? Why, then, would we think that fish sexual biology is a better model for us humans than that of octopuses?

What’s more, it frustrates me that those who continuously discuss sex changes in fish don’t get the fish-sex story straight in the first place. In reality, sex changes among the roughly 20 families and seven orders of teleost fish are driven by physiological and hormonal events that are triggered—depending on the species—by factors such as body size, perceived social status, or (in the monogamous clown fish Amphiprioninae) the disappearance of the large, breeding female. It’s also the case that those big, newly minted, dominant female clown fish are viciously aggressive to any fish they do not recognize as part of their group. So, if we’re taking our cues from clown fish, let’s not be hypocritical—let’s go all the way and demand that only extremely large, dominant, hyper-monogamous people who are particularly xenophobic should consider a sex change, and only after all the other females in the neighborhood have vanished. Does that sound reasonable? (I trust you realize I am being facetious here)

It should go without saying, but it appears that some still need a reminder: people are not fish. Fish live in the water. People live on land. When it comes to sex and reproduction, this makes all the difference in the world. In aquatic environments, you can simply release your gametes (eggs and sperm) into the water and let them drift around until they hook up. That’s because, in water, they won’t dry out and die. And neither will your embryos because they’ll be in the water, too. This is why so many fish can produce eggs or sperm at different times in their lives. It doesn’t take any specialized external organs to squirt gametes into the water, just a gonad for gamete production and an orifice for release.

However, the whole situation changes if you live on dry land. As mammals evolved for terrestrial life, they had to acquire adaptations—both structural and behavioral—to prevent their gametes and embryos from drying out. You can’t simply drop your sperms and eggs on the ground and hope for the best. So, male terrestrial animals evolved specialized external body parts for transferring sperm directly into females, who, in turn, have evolved body parts designed for receiving sperm and a chamber for nurturing the developing embryo until it is ready for life on dry land. Additionally—and equally important—both males and females evolved complementary neuromuscular behavioral patterns that allow them to court and mate successfully.

That’s why terrestrial mammals can’t change sex like some fish do. Such a transformation would require females to spontaneously sprout some kind of tube for internal sperm delivery, and males would need to somehow develop a complementary orifice. Moreover—and more importantly—both males and females would need to develop all the necessary internal parts and “plumbing” to make these external structures functional. It’s insufficient to merely alter the appearance of external structures, which can be done surgically (even on pets). A terrestrial animal transitioning from a female to a male would also require developing a complex duct system linking the gonads to the external tube, along with glands to secrete a carrying fluid and nutrients for the sperm (i.e., the Wolffian duct system, prostate, and bulbourethral glands). Going from male to female would involve developing some kind of organ to catch the eggs when they get released into the abdominal cavity, retain them until they encounter sperm, and then house the resulting embryo while it develops (these are derivatives of the Müllerian duct system).

Obviously, none of this could happen. When it comes to mammals, the die is cast prenatally. So, whatever fish do is their business and has absolutely nothing to do with terrestrial mammals. So, let’s drop the clown fish and Asian sheepshead wrasse analogies. Anybody who brings them up simply doesn’t understand evolutionary biology. It is futile to engage in discussions based on such analogies unless, of course, you’re one of those people who think that because some animals reproduce parthenogenically, humans should simply stop having sex altogether and hope for the best.

I want to make it clear that I have a deep understanding and empathy for those of us, including myself, who do not fit the popular stereotypes of any category or group. Throughout my life, I have received what seems to be an unrelenting stream of criticism for the fact that I was never (and still am not) perceived as representative of the norm (whatever that is). Consequently, I grew up defending those who were similarly targeted, and I believe that each of us should be continually mindful and accepting of the rich diversity of the human condition. Each of us should actively and consciously strive to be as compassionate, accepting, supportive, and inclusive as possible.

However, doing so does not require us to abandon reason, turn our backs on biology, or unhinge ourselves from reality.

#Frederick R. Prete #Frederick R Prete #people are not fish #sequential hermaphroditism #sex change #clownfish #human biology #human reproduction #evolutionary biology #reproduction #biology #biology lesson #gender ideology #queer theory #gender identity ideology #science #religion is a mental illness

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