Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
so the thing about Big Cats is that they’re all closely related members of the genus Panthera!
because they’re all part of the same lineage, they share a lot of traits like the ability to roar.
and cheetahs are actually members of a completely different cat lineage altogether, the genus Acinonyx!
they’re not very closely related to the big cats at all and are actually most closely related to Pumas, which you can totally see if you stack them up next to each other and squint really hard.
it’s okay though, the cheetah can still be the biggest cat in our hearts :’)
also some of you may have picked up on this, but the reason that the cheetah’s closest modern relative is a family of cats on an entirely separate fucking continent is that… drumroll please… cheetahs actually evolved in North America!
B-DM TSCH!
about nine million years ago in North America, cheetahs and pumas split off from the rest of the small-cat lineage together and evolved into their separate groups! different species of now-extinct ancient cheetahs thrived in North America for millions of years, streaking across the prairies and clobbering the everloving shit out of any herbivore too slow to get out of the way.
<art src: Peter Schouten>
(this is why the North American pronghorn antelope is actually the second-fastest land animal alive today, despite not having any current predators even vaguely in their speed range! once upon a time, not that long ago, they had to dodge a prehistoric cheetah that could pull highway-level speeds.)
cheetahs were successful enough that they even made it out of North America and into Eurasia via the Bering Land Bridge, only making it to Africa after conquering their way across the steppes!
but things changed, as they always do, and global climate disruption led the the extinction of all cheetah species except the one in Africa, effectively terminating the entire cheetah dynasty.
do they remember? I hope so.
pumas are doing JUST FINE, though! guess there’s something to be said for being a mid-sized hypergeneralist predator in the face of global change.
still so mad that PANTHERS are not technically in the genus PANTHERA
stop saying “cannibalism causes prion diseases” this is a common misconception
gonna preface this by saying I’m not trying to be weird or edgy here I just have an interest in diseases and find it frustrating to constantly see people spreading misinformation abt how they originate and spread
this misconception comes from an epidemic of kuru, a type of prion disease (you might also seem em referred to as TSEs) that broke out among the Fore people of Papau New Guinea in the 1950s. until colonial rule, the Fore people practiced a form of funerary cannibalism in which a loved one’s flesh, including organs, would be consumed after they died. this practice isn’t exclusive to the Fore, and has no profound inherent dangers; cooking and eating human flesh doesn’t have any more health risks associated with it than eating the flesh of an animal. what started the epidemic wasn’t the practice of cannibalism, but rather a stroke of incredibly, incredibly bad luck.
(more under the cut; there’s cannibalism and disease talk, but nothing graphic.)
You know, I was reminded of a post @genderkoolaid made a while ago about how AFAB and AMAB should be used in the past tense.
And why I agree, is because I’m so fucking sick of being told: “You’re technically a feeeeemale” because people say “He is afab” or “She is amab” when talking about trans people.
I WAS afab. I was assigned female at birth. Not only is that grammatically accurate (My birth was 20 years ago, and I was assigned female once), as a trans man I don’t identify as a woman anymore.
But with this new trend of using the present tense it feels like the that one decision the doctors made is still haunting me.
So I am NOT “technically a female”, I am male. I don’t give a fuck if those are scientific terms for people with dicks and balls, I am male, I will not be called a female anymore.
You know who says: “Yeah I’m a trans man bur I’m biologically a female”? Kalvin Garrah and transmeds. Because transmedicalism is based on saying “Hey cis people I knoooow it’s hard and sooooo confusing but please don’t misgender me uwu.
You can technically still do it by calling me a biological male or female, don’t worry I know I’m being so crazy and unreasonable, thanks for understanding!!!”
I’m pretty sure until a few years ago saying “I was AFAB/AMAB” was the norm, but then people started using acronyms as nouns without remembering their meaning (like with POC or they/them, I blame TikTok and Twitter and the need to fit discourse into 140 characters or less) and caring more about what our AGABs mean.
A few years ago the most used definitions were ftm and mtf. Those terms shouldn’t necessarily be the norm, and I think terminology changing isn’t a bad thing.
Plus those terms could make people who aren’t binary and intersex people feel excluded, so again it’s okay if you don’t wanna use those terms.
I, however, first identified as trans female-to-male and I think that’s a definition I really like for myself.
I think the freedom should be on the person to identify as they want; I like the past-tense for AGAB because it gives the freedom to the person to state if they still identify with their AGAB.
“They were assigned female at birth” is great. It tells you what the person was assigned at birth, but it doesn’t tell you how they identify now, and it doesn’t forcibly assign someone a sex right now they may not identify with anymore.
I need to remember to use the past tense more often. I personally still identify as female; it’s part of me, but I know not everyone who was afab is still afab.
It’s kind of a perfect solution, at least for right now. Maybe we’ll think of something better in the future, and that’s ok!
