The war on normality

Exciting news. To ‘showcase the vibrant diversity of both marine life and the LGBTQ+ community’, the visionary Bristol Aquarium has just announced a one-off tour of non-binary fish. On 28 June, its Sunset Seas exhibit will ‘celebrate love, life and the beauty of being yourself’ by illuminating with brightly coloured lights a collection of creatures that ‘defy the binary, change sex and mirror the spectrum of identities found in the human world’. Adults-only tickets are a mere £18.50, so rush to reserve your place now.

We’re presumably to conclude from this racy reveal that because some fish can change sex and hermaphroditic undersea organisms are commonplace, for humans sex is a phantasmagorical multiple choice and we can change sex, too. Thus the aquarium’s attendees can enjoy ‘a safe, inclusive and joyful space for people to connect and be themselves’. Or be other than themselves, which is more the point.

Now, I’m fractionally sympathetic with the yearning of marine biologists to appear with-it and right-on as the hallowed month of ‘Pride’ looms ever closer, when their field must present few opportunities to, if you will, get in the swim of things. There’s just one little problem: people are not fish.

Nature, which many progressives feign to revere, may display an exhilarating variety – or what those ineluctably drawn to the now most overused noun in the English language would choose to call ‘diversity’. But nature can also be infuriatingly rigid. She may seem bossy and unfair, but Gaia determined many years ago that humans are mammals, which reproduce through the mating of male and female. I hate to break it to the scads of young people desperate to distinguish themselves from dreary flat-out men and women and dumpy old heterosexuals, but for people there is no such thing as being ‘non-binary’.