"Sometimes a tower and a cave are just a tower and a cave."

Yeah, sometimes. But this doesn't happen to be one of them. The sexual metaphor for a chastity belt/loss of virginity is too obvious. I'm not one who goes looking for sexual metaphors, but the tower and the cave were pretty darned obvious from the moment of their introduction.

Oh, great! A "third sex" that was duplicitous and manipulative, and interfered in the natural relations between men and women. But fortunately they all died off, so heterosexual unions could reign free!

How edgy and novel. Now perhaps you can give us a cartoon about hook-nosed race that was greedy and tried to control everyone else's posessions. But it was so great after they were all killed off....

Now now don't be irate. This is Salondotcom. The hook nosed race really is the #1 danger and disaster of the world. In that case the tower is a chimney and we need to send them all up it.

...and in a cartoon, yet.

The term "third sex" in itself has long been a way to make other those who do not conform to normative standards of sex and gender--once, though long abandoned, it was applied to lesbians, by themselves if I correctly remember. Until they decided it was not appropriate.

Historically, as in Roscoe's book, Third and Fourth Genders in North American Aboriginals, it was a term used by a gay man to describe what we now call two spirit people.

Now, it is used to put transsexual people in their place.

Frankly, to me this is a distrubing vignette, using notions of deception--justification for, so-called, trans panic defences (such as that used by Allen Andrade to defend his murder of Angie Zapata, or by the killers of Gwen Arujo)--in an attempted light-hearted manner.

Hate often comes with a smiling face and the declaration, "lighten up!"

What is it about Carol that brings out the mean spirit in some people? I thought this was a really cute little idea, developed about as far as it needed to be lightheartedly. Carol is remarkable in having exceptional artistic talent and ideas I would never have thought of. The character with three bars in the first panel was hilarious from the outset.

Are the people accusing Ms. Lay of bigotry first-time readers of her comic strip? This is not "Mallord Fillmore" or some other conservative strip. Sometimes a third sex is just a third sex.

...whatever...

Just like the tower and cave obviously represent what we all know they represent, this "third gender" also obviously represents anyone who doesn't conform neatly to the first two.

Not a very nice cartoon.

Whether she intended to be bigoted or discriminatory or not, Carol Lay has definitely succeeded. 'Third Sex' as a term for GLBT has been around forever and in this cartoon, the metaphor is obvious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender

Salon should pull this immediately.

I can see how people might be offended by the comic. But in and of itself, that is not a good reason for pulling it. The first amendment protects offensive speech every bit as much as ordinary speech. More so, in fact, since offensive speech is more likely to need protection.

Anyway, if Salon were to pull everything they publish that might offend someone, they'd have to close up shop and go find new careers. Pretty much EVERYTHING on this site is likely to offend somebody or other.

I declare jihad. Let's burn something down!!!!!

The gay/lesbian/transsexual parallel is pretty obvious. I'm going to give Lay the benefit of the doubt and believe she didn't intend to be offensive, but I'm still not sure what her point was.

What a bunch of pansies.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but the suspicious critics of Ms. Lay's piece are suggesting an interpretation that so, so out of character for her work that I am incredulous at their gullibility and insensitivity... Or perhaps that's hyper-over-sensitivity?

Maybe it's that they just don't understand that Ms. Lay often works in the genre of Satire... Tell me, if Jonathan Swift published his "Modest Proposal" here in the pages of Salon.com, how many of our company would get extremely upset and imagine that he was actually recommending cannibalism?

For those who say "No one would ever make that mistake!" I point to the majority of letters expressing outrage and disapproval of Ms. Lay's story... Truly, as P.T. Barnum is commonly said to have observed, "There's a sucker born every minute...", no?

Whatever, their skewed misunderstandings of the piece are so off the mark, they have to be false.

I think folks are over analyzing this. Even the premise of the story is a bit flawed/goofy. Carol says that the third sex cannot reproduce with itself and she even gives us a nifty little set of equations in the second panel to illustrate her point.

But wait! The equations themselves don't make much sense. The third sex is really three different chromosomal combinations: ZZ, ZY ZX. Huh? So the Z chromosome is dominant? And if the third sex can't reproduce with itself, how would you ever generate a ZZ type, which presumably could only come from a ZZ + ZZ mating? (Note also that she only shows ZZ + XX and ZZ + XY matings, which would also never produce any new ZZ individuals.)

I'm an evolutionary biologist by trade, so I couldn't resist having a bit of fun with Carol's odd third-sex symbols. Anyway, Carol doesn't seem like the "gay bashing" type, so I'm inclined to interpret her cartoon as a bit of whimsy even if her knowledge of genetics is limited.

Also, the two normal sexes also can't reproduce by themselves (barring massive scientific intervention), so how does the third sex's inability to reproduce with its own kind make it any different than the two "normal" sexes?