View allAll Photos Tagged nonbinary
May 2021 photo shoot with Kani at The TX Studio. Natural light with fill provided by a Godox AD200 Pro strobe. Shot with a Canon 6D and Canon 85mm f/1.8 portrait lens.
No amount of legislation can make this go away: gender fluidity and gender diversity are natural conditions. They happen — in Nature. This is not a product of capitalist decadence. Get over it.
Last Autumn I observed a thing I'd never seen before. A few of the season's non-astringent Fuyu persimmons had seeds. Never, ever had I seen an astringent or a non-astringent persimmon with a seed. Learn something new every day, I say, and here was just such an opportunity.
I didn't dwell on it; just accepted it — until now. Back in November I posted a shot of tiny buds forming on a persimmon. Now, in December, they are opening as flowers. This is where it gets messy; non-binary. I went back in search of a decent flower for another post. How hard could it be? Harder than you might expect. Like the seeds in the Fuyu, I was in for a surprise.
All I ever wanted when I planted persimmon trees was persimmons. I've got more than I bargained for. Like now, as I write this and there is small hail pounding my windows. Yes, yes I know it is Summer; notionally. There's surprises everywhere.
Nobody told me, nor did I ask, that persimmons are (mostly) dioecious: they are either female or male. Buy a grafted tree from a nursery and it'll be female. Cleverly it will produce fruit parthenocarpically — without pollination. Those fruit will be seedless. It's a thing.
But I got fruit with seeds and fruit without seeds—from the same tree. Like the persimmons and their gender, I was accepting and confused at once.
Now we have an answer! Sometimes persimmons change gender, a lot like the beautiful, beautiful bearded dragons. By accident, in looking for the perfect flower I found the imperfection of Nature, the deviation from the expected and now the acceptance of the different. My Diospyros kaki var. "Fuyu" wasn't hiding this from me. I just didn't look, didn't see their gender fluidity. I am not diminished. I am enriched by this broader view of Nature, and accepting it, as should we all.