It’s comical how humans can overestimate their importance. Recently, just in time for Valentine’s Day, Gov. Kim Reynolds introduced House File 2389 that presumes to proclaim who is male and who is female—like Adam in Genesis, imposing names on all the animals. Before Adam butted in with his list of names, elephants and mice were getting along just fine. And if he had got their names mixed up, it would hardly have turned mice into elephants and elephants into mice. In a couple of weeks, it will be the start of Daylight Savings Time—as if some puny human could simply announce that the day begins one hour earlier and the sun instantly obeys him. Or that sunlight could be squirreled away for later when days are short.
It would seem Gov. Reynolds yearns to turn back the clock to a simpler time when boys wore blue and girls wore pink—a time when Barbies and Kens never got mixed up and they certainly never wore each other’s clothes. Back then, nobody said the word “gay” (except when they meant “happy”) and if there was any such thing as “transgender” or “non-binary”, people were too polite to mention it. But it’s different now and, like it or not, we can’t put that genie back in the bottle.
Referring to House File 2389, Denise Bubeck, the deputy director of The Family Leader’s Church Ambassador Network told The Des Moines Register, “It is legislation based on biological truth,” adding, “Actually, none of us would be here today if it wasn’t for biology.” You could also say none of us would be here if it wasn’t for geology or physics or math or agriculture or art history (okay maybe not art history). The point is, life isn’t that simple. Take Charlotte, the self-sufficient stingray.
Charlotte is a round, rust-colored stingray living in the Aquarium and Shark Lab run by Team ECCO in Hendersonville, N.C. For the past eight years, she has lived a single life without the company of a boy stingray, sharing her dumpster-sized tank with only a couple of small sharks. If she was lonesome or sad, she never let on. But just before Valentine’s Day, lab workers noticed a lump on her back, “blowing up like a biscuit.” Charlotte was pregnant. There was no mistake about it. It’s pretty easy to tell when a stingray is pregnant, being, as they are, ordinarily flat as a mudflap. The question is: who was the father? No, not one of the sharks.
Kady Lyons, a research scientist who works at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta speculates that Charlotte might be, not only the mother, but the father too. She suggests this could be a case of parthenogenesis, asexual reproduction in which a female can produce an embryo without a male. Lyons said that parthenogenesis is rare, even previously unknown for a round stingray, but she says, “nature finds a way of having this happen.”
So what is Charlotte anyway? A female? A male? Both? Neither? All the folks know at the Aquarium and Shark Lab is that in a couple of weeks, there will be four new tiny rubber Frisbees to feed. And Charlotte is going to need a bigger tank.