Transsexual Worms

It's a brand new blog, with brand new ideas, that looks remarkably similar to all kinds of other blogs, and to start off this thought provoking, opinion altering, visually similar writing project I'm going with hard hitting ground breaking stuff. Which is why I'm making the flagship post of THE DIRTY WORD all about mad scientist Erik Jorgensen and his trans worms.

As science director of the Brain Institute at the University of Utah he and his colleges developed a method that causes the female worms to be attracted to members of the same sex.


While working with a typically hermaphroditic species know as the nematode worm, the study estimated that only one out of five hundred of slimy bastards is actually born totally male, and must seek out a mate, while the rest of the population waits quietly, until the proper nutrients present itself, and then indulges in all the joyful delights of asexual reproduction that we humans will never know.


All worms are born totally blind and have evolved with special sensors in place of their absent optics. The males of the species use pheromone sensors to sniff out their potential romantic prospects and wiggle their way toward their smelly squeeze through the dirt, while the common agamous "female" gender uses those same sensors for detecting food.

What Jorgensen and his team did was change the hermaphrodite worms, who are essentially female with a small sperm reserve stored away somewhere in their little wormy bodies, by flipping "the genetic switches" in their brain cells so that they were mentally males. The laboratory outed annelids then began using the sensors they once used to find food, to find a mate, of the same sex. 

Awesome, isn't it?

Jorgensen hopes that this could be proof of what any mental health professional studying sexuality could of told you ten years ago, that homosexuality is hard wired into the brain, and that no amount of drugs or therapy or praying to white catholic Jesus will make it go away. He is, however, the first to admit that the human mind is infinitely more complicated then a worms (I hope) and warns anyone against reading too deeply into the data and jumping to conclusions.

Major media outlets, who aren't ignoring the story, have dubbed the creation the "lesbian worms" when really, if you consider the basic information as its presented, is wrong. Its plane to see that what Jorgensen has  done is create a race of young, gender confused, angsty, transsexual bugs. A mind, in an incorrect body, is the literal definition of transgendered when applied to human beings and seems to be a more appropriate fit.

The trick, of course, is to not confuse societies simplified labels with complicated facts about an odd, but no doubt interesting, experiment. Hopefully researchers will graduate onto similar studies, with more complicated manner of creature, and unlock deeper secrets in the science of sexuality.

In the mean time we'll all need to work on our gender neutral pronouns before going fishing.