this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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If we're being pedantic fungi have neither gender nor sex, they have "mating types". But yeah, mating types are more analogous to sexes than genders. Fungi would have to have some level of social experience to have gender.
To be fair, do we know for certain that fungi do not experience some form of social life?
It may not be human sapience but the mycelium networks hint at some forms of communicating information.
I reworded my comment a few times to try to hedge for that, without making any claims about fungi experiences because I couldn't know anything about that.
It's certainly possible fungi experience some abstract form of social life, but I think it's unlikely they have an experience of gender at all analogous to ours.
Input/Output and reacting to input in general is not analogous to sapience or even just sentience. Otherwise this would also be a hint that our phones have a social life.
Considering the spam calls I get, my phone has more of a social life than I do
its usually a denoted + OR - for mating pairs.