Fish

Yes this! I hate when people say biology supports their trans/homo/ect. phobia when in reality it absolutely does not
- Transphobic people must really hate frogs.
  
  And many kinds of fish! Like clown fish : ]
  
  I am trans and love toads
  
  Especially the gay ones.
  
  I think those are called amfibiphobes
  
  i don't think transphobes are educated enough to know frog biology. and if they are they suffer from a "humans are not animals" kind of mentality and put humanity on a pedestal of not being like the other ~~girls~~ living beings on this planet
- It's 1st grade biology!
  Yes, it is. Advertising the fact that you only know biology up to a 1st grade level is not the flex you think it is.
- Taxonomy isn't biology, though. It's a man-made classification system. And at the species level it's much closer to binary definitions than spectrums. So maybe not the best analogy to make.
  
  As is gender:
  A man-made classification system
  So I’d say it fits perfectly
  
  Until you start to use evolution. What a species is, begins to blur as soon as you try to establish evolutionary lines. When is a whale not a whale but just a water enthusiast mammal? somewhere between 50 and 35 million years ago. Exactly when, it's anyone's guess. Taxonomy is indeed part of biology, though.
  
  So biology isn't man made but god inspired?
- It's likely easier for people to learn to love trans people than understand there are no fish... If that tells you anything.

Attention! Turn back. Going into these comments can bring you nothing of happiness. You can just look up the "tumblr reading comprehension" meme instead of needing to see the gory details of it in action.
- But comments like that are exactly why I'm here!
  
  Haha fair enough, in that case you will find exactly what you're looking for.
  
  The warnings are clear but we choose to advance anyway.
- This is not a place of honor. Nothing of value is here.

Gender: fish

The world is a wonderful place, and far too wide to need to conform to your pet theory.
- I have a theory that you're all my pets. So you will conform, or you won't get a treat.
  
  I would oppose this theory, but I want treats more.
  
  I have a theory that you're all my pets.
  And I'm living off of grass, and the drippings from my ceiling It's okay to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings

Diogenes strips naked and does a cannonball into the pool
"Behold! A fish!"
- I wonder if that guy did shrooms.
  
  even Ancient Egyptians enjoyed some psychedelic lotus, so it's pretty likely. Psychedelic drugs have been a staple of human fucking around since forever

Fish absolutely exist cladistically, OP just didn't want to admit they're a land dwelling fish. You believe the implications of cladistics or you don't, cowards.
I'd also argue it's relatively easy to separate fish-fish from land fish from land fish that became sea fish again to bully the fish fish.
- Is fish just another name for vertebrates ?
  
  Nah. You could have a fish that evolved out of having a spine (see: Chuck Schumer) but you can't evolve out of a clade.
  
  Seems so. Wikipedia tells there are seven classes of vertebrates:
  Agnatha (jawless fishes, paraphyletic)
  Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes)
  Osteichthyes (bony fishes, paraphyletic)
  Amphibia (amphibians)
  Reptilia (reptiles, paraphyletic)
  Aves (birds)
  Mammalia (mammals)
  So yes, fishes is the same thing as vertebrates.
  Probably because if you were a vertebrate living in the sea, you needed some sort of gills and fins and such. And those are what makes people assume something is a "fish".
- You sound exactly like a specimen from the Dunning-Krueger clade
  
  I'm not gonna lie man this one sounded better in your head
  
  Considering that you misspelled the name of a common term and that's not a biological classification I'm going to stand by what the doctorates who taught my zoology courses said.

Just gonna swing by and drop this little grenade:
If you believe "race doesn't exist", then this post also applies to you. If you can refer to different genders while also understanding that at the individual level definitions are fluid and blurry, then you can refer to different races while also understanding that at the individual level definitions are fluid and blurry.
- Got it, fish are racist confirmed.
  
  Of course some fish are racist, especially humans.

Unfortunately I could still read this, needs more jpeg.

I try to tell folks all the time that biology is not as simplistic as they think. It's basically an endeavor of humans trying to make simplistic categories out of a naturally complicated clusterfuck. Some things defy labels, not everything fits into a nice, easy little box. Life is complicated. Get over it.

We're all just collectively ignoring the biologist's username?
I mean they are definitely correct, but that name detracts from their credibility somewhat.
- That's a problem for the future society
- What's the worst an evil biologist can do? Dissect a frog, but with a frown?
  
  Evil biologists might turn to galvanism to animate dead creatures
  
  You hire them as henchmen in Evil Genius and Evil Genius 2. They are a bit buggy though and sometimes forget where their whiteboards are.

Fish do not exist because of pedantic technicalities? Reality isn't real
- It's more that biological classification is tricky and linear, and vertebrates went in and out of the ocean a few times
  
  Aha okay. That makes me feel better, thank you.
- Have you heard about birds?
  It's worse.
  
  Birds also don't exist, it's all government drones.
  
  I mean they're just dinosaurs, which are also reptiles, which are also fish.
  
  Birds, surprisingly, are just air fish.
- This is like bemoaning the fact that doctors don't treat "the humors" anymore. We gained knowledge that invalidated what we thought we knew, so we've updated our understanding. Unless you're a taxonomical marine biologist, it's really very unimportant anyway, I wouldn't worry about it.
  
  At least I can stop worrying about the fishmen abducting me in my sleep, they don't exist anymore because of this classification revelation
- No no, it's that humans are technically in the fish group of evolution, even though it happened a LONG time ago. That's what they mean by "cladistically", there is no "clade" of fish. Look up "humans are hagfish by Clint's Reptiles". He explains it wonderfully
  
  Wow. This video was great. Thank you!!
- Yeah I disagree with the idea that there is no such thing as a fish.
  It's like saying that there are no striped animals because both zebras and snakes can have stripes.
  Sure, there is no common ancestor for hundreds of millions of years but that doesn't mean that they aren't a thing. ¯(ツ)/¯
- Just because we lack a definition, doesn't mean something doesn't exist.
  
  It's not even that we lack a way to define fish, it's more that we lack a definition that isn't arbitrary. One can define them as something like "vertebrates, except for all these ones that we don't want to include", but then there's not really a clear reason to exclude all the amphibians and reptiles and mammals and such, other than that they don't traditionally get called fish. Some of them even live in water, and a handful of fish can leave the water to a limited extent, so it isn't even that.
  
  When it's a grouping that we lack the definition for, then the group doesn't really exist, even if it's members do and we all gave a good idea of what are, for instance, fish. Basically the group 'fish' contains all the things you think are fish, which is problematic as someone else may have a different idea of which things belong in the group, and while that's fine when talking coloquially, you can't really use it when trying to discuss things in a rigerous fashion.
  
  We don't lack a definition, we actually just have so many narrower definitions that we don't need one for "fish" anymore. The old, broad definitions become archaic and often inaccurate as we gain more knowledge.
- Scientists said the oceans would run out of fish by 2048. In fact, fish stopped existing today. Sick burn.

Bees are fish.
(in California)

Pizza is a vegetable
- Things a Republican Congress will vote for are crazy man

"Gender is absolutely the same way." - from How to Start a Vicious Online Argument
- Honestly I sometimes feel like going to certain online communities and just making a single post that says "gender" and then vanishing and watching the ensuing arguments.
  
  They called him "The Sniper". He would strike without warning, always vanishing into the ether. No downvote could stop him. No harsh rebuke could change his merciless ways.

I was going to say ‘how about bony fish?’, but then I checked and I am technically a bony fish (Osteichthyes).

Regarding "fish" Old classification relied on "phenotype" characteristics. And yes lamprey, a shark or a cod has little in common genetically. But they still share some common traits that distinguishes them considerably from whales, sea lions and seals. I still think the term "fish" is useful, and modern classifications rely more on genetics so I would say that the argument is semi void.
- They didn't say that fish wasn't a useful concept, they said that the more you delve into the facts, the less certain you can be that it has a definite meaning that can be pinned down scientifically.
  People think the science agrees with them that the world can be divided into fish and not fish, but that's absolutely not what the science is saying, and their understanding is superficial.
  Similarly, the terms male and female are generally quite useful, but the people who think that there's some kind of scientific and absolute binary distinction between them are just incorrect, and their understanding is superficial.
  
  I mean there are lots of differences between male and female.

Source (Tumblr), alternate frontend

actually no such thing as fish
ELI22 undergrad degree?
- Take "Spider" for example, that is a fairly well definied term for all animals in the order "Araneae". But that doesn't really work for the term "Fish". There a many dozens of completely different orders with thousands of species that are refered to as "Fish". It's a bit like saying "thing that swims in the water".
  
  My 5 year old says "thing that swims in the ocean/lake with exception of mamals is good fish"
- When organizing the big family tree of everything that's alive, you use clades, which means a group that all of the individuals in it have the same common ancestor. E.g. All vertebrates, wether mammals, reptiles, etc, have the same vertebrate ancestor. Mammals also share the same tetrapod ancestor, so they're all tetrapods.
  Fish doesn't work like that, because we don't count all the its ancestors as fish (tetrapods have a common bony fish ancestor, for example, but you wouldn't call a parrot a fish). But you know what a fish is. We call this a paraphyletic group.

"What is a Fish?" coming soon

Whales are fish, fite me
- The only land animals that aren't fish are animals with exoskeletons. Whales are fish just as much as you and me are. And we are fish :)
  
  Thank you for agreeing with me, but I specifically asked for a fight

Transphobes 🤯 after reading this
- Not even close to a transphobe and my mind is still blown at the fact of the nonexistence of fish.

Slightly off-topic from the intended point, but I've heard this more often, that there's no such thing as a fish, but it's a useful constructed concept to have.
So why is it so important that we all remember that animals like whales are not fish, they're mammals? Didn't stop us from calling animals from other groups fish, why should mammals get a special treatment?
- The point is to emphasize that whales biologies are significantly different from other similar-looking things, not technicalities about which named group they belong to.
- Because mammals got those mammaries. So deeply rooted that humans can't stop putting them even on non-mammals when we want to anthropomorphise in stories, myths and art

One man opinion about fish is not a universal truth.

Taxonomy is pseudoscience.