Since I don't think fungi have a social structure, those are sexes.
Humans have two Sexes but also gender expression, conflating those is how transphobes come to their views.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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If we're being pedantic fungi have neither gender nor sex, they have "mating types". But yeah, mating types are more analogous to sexes than genders. Fungi would have to have some level of social experience to have gender.
To be fair, do we know for certain that fungi do not experience some form of social life?
It may not be human sapience but the mycelium networks hint at some forms of communicating information.
I reworded my comment a few times to try to hedge for that, without making any claims about fungi experiences because I couldn't know anything about that.
It's certainly possible fungi experience some abstract form of social life, but I think it's unlikely they have an experience of gender at all analogous to ours.
Input/Output and reacting to input in general is not analogous to sapience or even just sentience. Otherwise this would also be a hint that our phones have a social life.
Considering the spam calls I get, my phone has more of a social life than I do
its usually a denoted + OR - for mating pairs.
Humans have more than 2 sexes. Sex is a convenient category based around a phenotype, not a golden rule that all organisms adhere to. People who exist outside those phenotypes are not defective or malformed and do not necessarily require surgeries to 'correct' their bodies and make them fall in line with binary sex categories.
The reason that science has been able to assert that sex is binary is by excluding all organisms that exist outside those phenotypes. Its a problem when those organisms are people, as you are functionally erasing their existence or at the least handwaving it away as irrelevant. This is one of the many vectors along which intersex people experience discrimination.
By asserting sex as binary and immutable you are actually doing the legwork of transphobia for transphobes. They also assert that sex is binary and immutable. They deny that any such thing as gender identity or expression exists in the first place, instead asserting that gendered behavior is a direct product of biology.
I am not a 'male woman', to even try and state that is to deny my own biology and experience. It is transphobia.
Quality rant, thanks for the on point wording!
Yeah, sex is bimodal, not binary
Perfect use of scientific vocabulary.
I will say that Sam Seder from Majority Report helped me with the specific language there.
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(19 replies)
I need more details about these bigoted mushroom fans
Yeah, what? Spill the context, OP!
I don't want mushrooms going to school with my kids.
Is the mycology community bigoted? Lots of weirdos so I would have guessed they might be more tolerant but I guess it does skew kind of older.
Not in my experience.
I haven’t experienced this either but I’m privileged and have only interacted with this community a little bit. So I was curious if anyone had had such experiences.
Mycologists typically understand and listen to science so I'm not sure where this is coming from
Some species have 20k+ genders. S. Commune I think is one.
sounds like someone is waking up to that gender is socially constructed except without waking up and instead going deeper to sleep
It's not even genders, it's a whole different type of reproduction. Sexual types.
Mushrooms do not have male and female sexes; instead, they have mating types, a system of genetic factors that determines compatibility for sexual reproduction. Unlike animals, fungi don't possess specialized organs for sex, but can have thousands of different mating types within a single species, allowing for broad reproductive compatibility and increasing genetic diversity.
Mushrooms must look at us like we look at monocellular life.
We don't, in and of itself, eat monocellular life, the way the fungi eat our dead. All the dead, really. Well, unless your religious enough that even they don't want to.
Yeah but that's not the analogous part
Are sure about that?
fungi also uses PRIONs that is part of its evolution/physiology, and not a disease like in mammals, since they have different origins.
What's that mean exactly, that they use proteins that can be further folded, and they exploit that property?
Why, yes, exactly that.
yes, i skimmed research papers on this, and essentially yes, fungi can produce prions that have different conformation which is beneficial for its survival.
I guess the surprising thing is that only (?) fungi do that
yea, Its actually more complicated than i thought, different species utilizes thier prions differently, different functions. one species can use prions from being merged by another colony of the same species, maintaining that population instrad. although it seems only some prions are useful, and some are inert, and some are not benificial.
I always imagine mushrooms as a hive mind
It's not gender, it's mating genotypes. They don't even have male female. Science is awesome but don't trick people into saying something incorrect.
Mycologists are fine, it's the fan club that gets weird.
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