On False Crabs and Real People

Right now, in the US and UK especially there is a ton of transphobia, and every time I hear cis people being weird about trans people, I think of king crabs. Yes, crabs. Now, bear with me because this will make sense.

So you know king crabs, right? Giant crab, long legs, lives in very cold water up north for the most part, you find them in seafood boil bags, very expensive and tasty, a star of Deadliest Catch. Well, did you know that king crabs aren’t technically crabs?

Now, the thing with crabs is that they are an optimal life form: the perfect shape, the right amount of agile and little guy, can fit into many ecological niches while being able to survive well. Over eons, you had crabs evolve, but you also had convergent evolution where other things also evolved into crabs. If you look at crabs closer, you will notice that there are different infraorders in regards to their classification. You have true crabs, which are infraorder brachyura and are the original crab lineage. Then, you have false crabs, which belong in the infraorder anomura and have evolved to look and be like crabs.

Can the general public tell a true crab from a false crab? No. If it has the right amount of legs, looks crab shaped, and acts like a crab, it is for all intents and purposes, a crab.

People don’t go to a seafood restaurant and get upset because king crab is listed in the selections of crabs or in the crab tank with the other crabs when it’s a false crab because it is identified as a crab. If you went into a seafood market and started checking to see if the crabs were true crabs or false crabs by flipping them over and checking their abdomens for any remnants of the tail false crabs have, people would think there was something wrong with you and kick you out. That’s basically how transphobes and terfs behave. They just heard about false crabs, so now, they need to disturb everyone by checking all the crabs in the tank under the guise of safety when all the crabs were fine mingling together. The panic over true and false is made up.

The only people who really care about the difference between true crabs and false crabs are scientists who are looking at very specific parameters in their studies, and this is how it should be with cis and trans people. Medical professionals or scientists who study differences in hormones or anatomy, probably need to know, but for the vast majority of people, there is no difference and it isn’t their business. And once hormones/hormone replacement therapy gets involved and levels are stable for a while, there is very little difference between binary trans people and cis people.

And even without hormones, if a person decides to change their clothes and name to socially transition, then respect them; it isn’t hard. If you would not pop the shell off a hermit crab and declare to everyone that isn’t a true crab and shouldn’t be called a hermit crab or allowed a shell, then don’t call out people for being trans in a negative way. Yes, hermit crabs, one of the most famous crabs, is a false crab. It has a tail inside its shell.

Horseshoe crabs do not pass very well as crabs. They are shaped like a toilet seat and have a long tail and look nothing like a crab apart from their legs, and yet we still call them crabs without any fuss. It truly isn’t hard to respect what something or someone is called.

The thing with crabs is that creatures evolve into them because it is beneficial to their survival and being trans is the same way. People transition because it is the thing that will keep them alive. It is beneficial to their soul and mental and physical health. Just because they didn’t start out that way doesn’t mean it isn’t better for them to change and become something new.

If someone says they are a woman or a man or nonbinary or anything in between, respect it and acknowledge it because if you can manage to call anything remotely crab-shaped a crab, then congrats, you can respect a trans person’s gender and identity no matter how well they perform their gender.