Gender Equality for Weed
Your typical plant has two sexes (male and female), and marijuana, Cannabis sativa,1 is no exception. For most plants, this simple biological fact isn’t a big deal, but it just so happens that in the case of marijuana, there is a definite prejudice in favor of the female sex.
The explanation is simple: if you want to smoke a reefer with a high THC content, the place to get it is from the buds of the female plant. Males, when it comes to potency, just aren’t in the same league.
Now, if this strikes you as unfair, as blatant sexism, as horrific injustice, you’re perfectly right. But what can you do? Complain to the United Nations or the Supreme Court? That might be fun, but it won’t bring about justice for male marijuana.
However, enterprising growers in Colorado have developed a more practical solution: transsexual cannabis. While this new strain, “Trans-Grass,” is genetically female (with a THC content as high as 12%), it feels “like a male on the inside.” The grower who developed this new variety, Chris Tiresias, hopes that it will help to end “the appalling plague of discrimination against the male marijuana plant.”2
“Cannabis Leaf 2,” by Christopher Thomas CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons;
“Cannabis male flowers” by Banana Patrol. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
- As well as the other species of Cannabis, indica and ruderalis. ↩
- Note that The Flying News does not support, promote, advocate, or otherwise endorse the use of any illegal substances—this includes, but is not limited to, marijuana, raw milk, DDT, and Bavarian Cream—nor do we condone, accept, or approve of any sort of deliberate intoxication. ↩
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The same thing happens with all species of squash. While each plant has both male and female blossoms, the females are the only ones that produce fruit, meaning they get all the attention. So it seems that Mother Nature herself discriminates against the males in this case. Therefore, it is imperative that we put things right and call for Mother Nature to cease this unjust discrimination, and allow both male and female blossoms to produce fruit. Whether by force of law or genetic engineering, this must be stopped.
firstly sexism concerns only human, it doesn’t concern plants at all.
secondly sexism is the systemic oppression against womyn [sic] and gender minorities, in a case were females are prefered [sic] it has nothing to do with sexism, at [sic] the contrary it can be like “positive discrimination”, it compensate a bit. it would be cissexist if transwomyn can’t beneficiate [sic] of it though.
thirdly there is a confusion between trans and intersex. being trans means having psychologically and not phenotypically a gender different from the one assignated at birth (which is usually correlated with the biological sex). having a phenotypical sex different from the genetical sex is a way to be intersex. being intersex is when you can’t tell for sure “this is a female” or “this is a male” because it’s ambiguous. it has nothing to do with gender, it is only biological. of course it has issues related to the gender because it’s more complicated to assignate a gender to a person who has an ambiguous sex, that’s why doctors usually operes intersex babies to make them fit in an arbitrary sex to assignate them a gender.
so don’t make the confusion:
sex is something biological and has many components like the vulva/penis, the presence or not of boobs, the hormons, the genes, …
gender is something cultural based on social constructions
females/males is related to sex
womyn/men is related to gender
VIM VOCIFERO REPLIES: R., it seems to me that your reply is ultimately speciesist, as it completely fails to touch on the experience of the vegetable kingdom, where, in the case of Cannabis sativa, the harshest discrimination is real, ruthless, and radical.