Thread by @AnElegantWitch

TERFs don’t believe in evolution and are anti-science.

As a trans woman in the field of Paleontology I find the “biological sex as immutable fact” argument offensive as a scientist (and trans person), it’s illogical within context of our geologic past.

Let me explain.

1/?

First, I think I’m finally figuring out this whole twitter thing. It’s about cute selfies, so buckle up. That way I can trick you into learning about geology and paleontology, the real passions of my life.

Reminder: Paleontology is the study of ancient life and ecosystems.

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Please remember, much like my geo-pick says. Safety first when it comes to interacting with Transphobes. TERFs and their ilk do not operate in good faith and are unwilling to accept any facts that do not conform to their twisted views of biology.

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I hope to bring Trans and Non-binary folks comfort in realizing that we are all part of the beautiful tapestry of life and that the bigots are just ignorant bigots.

I’m also going to try to keep this accessible, DM me if you want to get into the weeds.

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It might help to understand how I view life, and it’s important to cleave off this anthropocentric view humans have on earth. To me humans are insignificant in geologic context, we share far more genetics with the rest of life than what makes us special.

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We are pretty incredible, we more than any species before us can (1) shape the world in ways no other life form has and (2) have the capacity to reflect on our place on earth.
When it comes to life though, we’re just a minor part of the much larger tapestry.
6/?

What makes us insignificant is time and the vast history of fossilized life we have that can be dated and identified. Humans are not that old as a species, unlike the horseshoe crab, which showed up 445 Million Years Ago (MYA).

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Humans have been around less than 200,000 years. The world though is 4.54 Billion Years Old (GYA).

Here’s where time is such an important element. Numbers that large lose their meaning. I love this analogy: 1 Million Seconds is 1.6 weeks. 1 Billion Seconds is 31 YEARS.

8/?

I have to visit quickly the most important process on earth: Plate Tectonics.

Plate tectonics is EVERYTHING. It started right around the beginning of our planet's formation, when things cooled enough for plates to form.

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I can not understate how important tectonics is to life, that will come up later, but it recycles all the materials of our planet through heat driven from the core through gravity. Volcanoes, earthquakes, Mountain Ranges, almost everything that is earth is it’s product.

10/?

The oldest known fossils are cyanobacteria from 3.5 GYA, found in fossils in Australia. That is our ancestor. These life forms existed in the Pre-Cambrian period (4.54 GYA - 541MYA), which represents the first 4 billion years of our planets history.

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The first instances of sexual reproduction occurred about 1.2 GYA from the species Funisia. Which was a standing worm anchored to the benthic zone (bottom) of our oceans.

Before that biologically speaking sex was nonexistent. Sex allowed for genetics to be shared ;)

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How do we date fossils? There’s a ton of ways, and new methods emerge all the time and generally they agree.

Igneous (magma/volcanic origin) rocks are very easy to date, they were born and they start to decay. Internal elements like uranium decay, and you can date them.

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Ammonites are a great group to date fossils like this lovely ring.

They existed in the droves of species and were unique, often living and dying and fossilizing easily quickly. Ultimately it’s the sum of dating methods that makes geologic dating effective.

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Life in the pre-cambrian was “boring” in some regards. In fact what separates it from the Paleozoic (541-251 MYA) is when life got interesting, which is referred to as the Cambrian Life Explosion.

Suddenly the fossil record diversifies in ways it never did before.

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There’s a few ideas for why that is. To instill a textbook into a few sentences: phytoplankton, which can form as photosynthetic cyanobacteria or single-celled algae. Started amassing 2.4 GYA and dumped a bunch of toxic gas into the atmosphere: Oxygen.

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The ocean and atmosphere have a relationship. Gases exchange between each other quiet readily. A modern example is ocean acidification driven by climate.

Back in the pre-cambrian around 1.5 GYA the chemistry of our ocean were getting less acidic.

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throughout these billions of years plate tectonics was creating continental crust which in turn allowed for weathering and erosion from the sun evaporating sea water which rained down into onto these continents and washed tons of CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) into the sea.

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These ancestors were able to take calcium carbonate and because the ocean was getting less acidified it allowed for life to start building calcium structures, over those structures being unable to form or even dissolve.

You can thank these 1,500 MYA lifeforms for bones.
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I would like to introduce you to my favorite group of fossils of all time. The Trilobite. They showed up at that edge between the Paleozoic and were prolific in the following 200 Million Years (hard shells fossilize easily, so there is a bias).

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20,000 different species of trilobites lived. They are among the first life forms we know of with “complicated” eyes. They made calcium carbonate crystals to focus light onto a set of photo sensitive cells below.

This is believed to have set off a revolution in adaptions.

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If I can see you, and you me. I can chase you more easily than just bumping into you. Life got interesting “fast” with profound implications for camouflage, size, speed, etc. So does sex as you want to select based on the characteristics of who is best at survival.

22/?

In the cambrian we start to see our earliest examples of sexual dimorphism and secondary sex characteristics, like competition or body mods.

A male elk with a sweet rack of antlers is showing off that it knows where all the most nutritious food is and has killer genes.

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Adaptation is critical to life and life on this planet is defined by change driven by plate tectonics. Without change life doesn’t have a reason to make new adaptations generally speaking. The fossil record proves this over and over.

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Moments of profound global change lead to profound accelerations of new species in the new conditions, or the opposite: extinction.

I think of life as a virus, its adapting to survive on this planet. Without the net of diversity, life its likely to have died out on earth.

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The Paleozoic was just incredible in ways I will spend my life trying to get people excited about. Life left the seas for the continents and the appearance of the phylum Chordata: vertabrates but also sea squirts and lancets. Weird that we share the same phyla huh?

26/?

early Chordata: Genus Microbrachius (380MYA), a member of the Placodermi class (armored fish). is the oldest fossil we know of with sexual dimorphism but males and females carried both sex organs.

~5MY before Tiktaalik, the transitional species to land based animals.
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I’m also not going down the rabbit hole of the countless examples of species, that show this same kind of ability to adjust their biological sex as so many other smarter trans people have shown that. I want to highlight how long ago biological sex wasn't immutable.

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Humans are the ones who removed themselves from our living siblings and made ourselves queen. That separation has already wrought so much destruction and havoc on the world. The earth is a closed system and is good at balancing the equation with extinction…

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Sadly the Paleozoic would end in a big way. As the supercontinents Laurasia was smashing into Godwana to form Pangea volcanism along the “northern” boundary of the continent led to a global warming event, the great dying, the single greatest extinction event on record.

30/?

Extinction is just when life can not keep up fast enough with changing conditions, which is often driven by plate tectonics. Our continents are in a slow dance across our globe.

Spoiler alert: Life did find a way! In burrowers and life forms adapted to an anoxic environment.
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What the fuck are you talking about Zoey?

Deep in what makes you, you is the fingerprint of ever common ancestor that has shared this planet with us. They are survivors and adapters. The more you study evolution and the history of life the more it necessitates one fact:

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Life is a messy spectrum, not a binary. A fixed view of biology and sex is wrong and incompatible. Variation among species is how life survives this planet. The code has it’s rigidity but is designed for experimentation of the boundaries.

The stories are there in stone.

33/?

Thanks for humoring me! Remember that TERFs and Transphobes are anti-science bigots. Any TERFs want to at me, Im here with primary sources. Bitches hate primary sources.

Take my word for it, being trans is a natural part of this world.

#TransIsBeautiful .

/end

I should add that variation WITHIN a species is critical as to it's survival. Viruses show that quite dramatically, if every species was the same a virus would wipe out the entire species.

So even within a single species variation is critical and what makes humans so beautiful.

I should have said that Microbrachius was a genus that showed both sexual dimorphism and had both sex organs.

Sexual dimorphism was around before them.

Basically there were distinct males and females but they could switch sexes 380MYA.