Margaret Price’s poem “Slime Molds Have Eleven Sexes” was published in The Gay & Lesbian Review in 2003. “Beyond the binary, not hung up,” it goes; “and probably wearing tiny berets.” Which some of the Physarumabsolutely do. That we now believe, only twenty years later, that slime molds actually have 720 sexes illustrates how we are still on the frontier of myxomycetes discovery.
Price first learned about slime molds in 1995 at the University of Michigan in a class called “Behavioral Biology of Women,” taught by the anthropologist Barbara Smuts. She was twenty-five at the time, had grown up in a “mostly male, extremely sexist environment,” and was struggling to come out as queer and as genderqueer. “I never forgot that same-sex relationships and diverse sexes were not deviant,” she wrote to me. “They are in fact normal across many species.”
Creatures That Don’t Conform – Lucy Jones
