Drawing Of A Martha's Vineyard Sloop, By Henry Rusk, 1935

Untitled, painting by ABeardedArtist

Wheat Fields at Auvers Under Clouded Sky (1890) by Vincent van Gogh

I love how ominous and cryptically poetic the ravens part sounds

I was really hesitant when my mom said she wanted to go to this wolf dog sanctuary several hours south of us. I didn’t want to be a tourist for a shady off brand zoo. But I looked the place up before agreeing. They’re completely aboveboard, all animals are spayed/neutered when entering the haven and they’re all given the space and respect they deserve.

The sanctuary serves as education and warning. Don’t get wolf dogs is practically emblazoned on every sign.

All the animals were high content, 95% wolf were most common. Their lowest was about 75% and his silly curled tail marked him as doggier than any of the others, yet he still had a sad story of being dumped in a shipping crate for days because he was too much for a house pet. Probably because he’s largely a wolf.

At the end the owner invited their two friendly ambassador animals to see if they’d like to say hello. They both did. I was politely sniffed and had my chin gently licked by the older male. The younger female demanded aggressive belly rubs and then set about biting the owner in a rough game that only she enjoyed.

Overhead ravens swooped in the treetops and made eerie eldritch calls to each other, like an echoing plink of water at the bottom of a well. It was honestly such a day.

Lumi, my favorite wolf of the day as tax he was huge and gangly and paced the fence staring at me, perhaps remembering the eighteen year old girl who had kept him in an apartment to be bred before he came to the sanctuary.

Siegfried (1921) by Thomas Theodor Heine | The Cat on the Pillow (19th century) by Adolf von Becker

Dear fiction writers there is no such thing as an "intersex species", please stop telling me that your alien species is intersex rep.

That's not what intersex means. If your reasoning for a character being intersex is "they're a [insert species that has different sex characteristics from humans]", just stop.

If "all of them are intersex" then they aren't intersex. They just have different sex traits/reproductive organization from humans. If thats how they typically look, thats just what being perisex (non-intersex) looks like for that species. Intersex refers to an individual with sex characteristics atypical for their species.

This also goes for third sexes. That's not atypical if it's a commonly observed cluster of traits recognized as "a sex", that means that'd just be another form of being perisex (for that species). Intersex essentially means 'other' or 'neither', the point of the word is that we don't fit into the boxes provided for most of the population, not that we're a rare and magical third box.

Additionally shapeshifters (usually) also come off as bad rep for the same reason. If your character is intersex because they're a shapeshifter, they're not intersex. You don't become intersex, you're born that way. I don't like when characters have their bodies altered later in life and are called intersex for those modifications. And the idea that a character is becoming intersex by transforming their body just reinforces the idea that there is a certain type of way an intersex body looks, and that intersex is something you can 'become' via bodily alterations. We can look like anything. Sometimes our variations are only visible through chromosome or hormone testing. And often we have our bodies changed against our will to make our intersexuality less obvious. If you can become intersex via body alterations, does that mean medical abuse removes our intersexuality?

Yes, you can have a non-human character be intersex‐ if that individual has variant sex characteristics by the standards of their species.

Yes, you can write a species with bigenitalia (both parts)- just don't call them intersex or hermaphrodites (that is a slur). Some better terms are cosexed, monoecious, gonosimulites, dualsex

Yes, you can write shapeshifters as intersex- as long as you understand what intersex means and apply the actual definition of the word to the context of your story.

«Axe gallant», date unk. photography © EWAN LEBOURDAIS (contemporary, French)

Sestroretsk, Leningrad oblast (1972)