So apparently there’s this thing going around where people are pissed that Aranea called human reproduction “heterosexual”
Which like, yeah I saw one of the arguments that popped up on janecrocker’s post, and I can see how y’all would feel that way
But I think it’s important to remember that once again:
The English language is stupid as fuck.
Namely, in this case “heterosexual” (or homosexual) can refer to sexuality (as in attraction), or reproduction, and there’s only a contextual differentiation.
So from the more scientific side of things, it seems to be the right word:
“Hetero” means “different” more or less; a lot of times it gets summed up as “opposite” but that’s dumb because there’s uses like “heterozygotic” where the alleles aren’t opposite, just different.
“sexual” in this case, given the context of reproduction, is just like a method of genetic recombination; you take two sets of parent genomes and mix them, rather than replicating it from one parent (asexual reproduction)
So in the context of reproduction, heterosexual is basically saying functional reproduction requires two different sets of functional reproductive organs (but theoretically I think maybe you could combine the genes of two female eggs in vitro? Sperm too but it’d be trickier cuz you can’t end up with a YY combo. No idea if this is on the science radar though it seems like it’d be tough as fuck to do). And bisexual basically means any combination of functional reproductive organs can lead to a successful offspring - same or different.
Believe me I tried to think of a better word, and the closest I got was Hetero/homozygous. But that’s not it because in scientific literature it always refers to the alleles provided by the zygotes (again, you’d think it’d mean that the zygotes are same/different but here we are with a dumb as fuck language).
But yeah if you got any questions or hey better yet a suggestion of what the right word might be (because fuck if I know literally everything), hit me up
Aight ScienceDave out
