i wanna learn to sex chickens. i’d really love for that to be on my
resume
katie
PREFACE
I wrote this on a whim because of an offhand comment in an internet
chat room, in isolation while suffering from COVID-19. It’s part fever
dream, and if parts of it don’t make sense, that’s why.
BACKGROUND
There is no technique or theory that even the most advanced chicken
sexer can ever teach you on the topic of sexing chickens. Indeed, the
only way to learn chicken sexing is to sex chickens.
The best chicken sexers in the world hail from Japan. When chicken
hatchlings are born, large commercial hatcheries usually set about
dividing them into males and females, and the practice of distinguishing
the two genders is known as chick sexing. Sexing is necessary because
the two genders receive different feeding programs: one for the females,
who will eventually produce eggs, and another for the males, who are
typically destined to be disposed of because of their uselessness in the
commerce of producing eggs; only a few males are kept and fattened for
meat. So the job of the chick sexer is to pick up each hatchling and
quickly determine its sex in order to choose the correct bin to put it
in. The problem is that the task is famously difficult: male and female
chicks look exactly alike.
Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks
known as vent sexing, by which expert chicken sexers could rapidly
ascertain the sex of one-day-old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s,
poultry breeders from around the world traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick
Sexing School in Japan to learn the technique.
The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It
was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional
sexers could not report what those cues were. Instead, they would look
at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the
correct bin to throw it in.
And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The
master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The students would
pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the
other. The master would give feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of
this activity, the student’s brain was trained up to masterful—albeit
unconscious—levels.
Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain, David
Eagleman
Interpreting the metaphorical meaning of this is an exercise left up
to the reader.
HOW TO PLAY
The point of this game is to—via the CHICKEN SEX INTUITION
MAP—progress from a novice chicken sexer to an expert chicken sexer so
that you can begin your career as a world-renowned, globe-trotting,
highly sought after Expert Freelance Chicken Sexer.
CHICKEN SEX INTUITION MAP
Start at A. Read the appropriate PROMPT below for this and every
subsequent hex you land on. Roll 2d6, sum the two results, and move
according to the legend shown at J. You can leap off the edge of the map
to the hex on the opposite side, but you cannot cross over the red
lines.
If you get to S you become an Expert Freelance Chicken Sexer and win
the game.
When told by the PROMPT to roll dice, roll 2d6, plus an additional d6
for each current rank above novice:
Novice (2d6 total)
Beginner (3d6 total)
Competent (4d6 total)
Proficient (5d6 todal)
Expert (6d6 total)
Note: J is rankless. Treat it as a Novice hex in that you only roll
2d6.
If your highest single roll is 5 - 6, you SUCCEED.
Otherwise you FAIL. The stakes for success and failure are determined by
the PROMPT.
PROMPTS
There’s no wrong way to respond to the prompts. You can just read one
and then continue playing. Or you can get out a pen and a journal and
write out a response to each prompt. You can read 3 - 5 prompts and then
respond to them in bulk. It’s all up to you.
Today is your first day as a novice Chicken Sexer. You journey begins
here, now, peering into the rear of a one day old chick. Roll to make a
first impression. If you succeed, the Master Chicken Sexer sees promise
and potential in you. If you fail, they single you out as an example to
the others.
One your fellow novice chicken sexers flames out on the very first day.
How embarrassing! Do you comfort them and encourage them to try again?
Or are you happy to have less competition?
You hear a rumor that the Master Chicken Sexer lost their left pinky
finger in a horrible chicken sexing accident when they themself was a
novice, and that’s why they’re so hard on new novices each year. That
said, the master sexer is really riding your ass. This is harder than
you thought.
These long days of sexing are killing you! Such long hours on your feet.
Even a stupid baby knows that chicken sexing is important because the
chicks have different health and dietary needs based on their sex. The
male chicks should never be exposed to light—especially sunlight, which
will kill them—must never come into contact with water, and above all
should never be fed after midnight. The female chicks. The female are
taken away to be secretly schooled through years of physical and mental
conditioning to obtain superhuman powers and abilities that seem magical
to outsiders. The intersex chicks are exposed to the spores of the
fruiting Sulfur Shelf plant, becoming psionic symbiotic superchick
myconids. The outersex chicks have no viable use that can be exploited,
but are considered holy and enjoy a life of leisure being pampered
during their early retirement on Vacation Island.
These chicks all look alike. You start to doubt that you’ll ever become
an expert freelance chicken sexer. Your overworked brain feverishly
tries to force chicken sex patterns everywhere you look: peering into a
drawer or a cabinet, peering between the pages of a book, pulling back
the bedsheets before crawling into bed. You unconsciously and
automatically assign them all a chicken sex.
You feel like you didn’t sex even 50% of your chicks correctly today.
Frustration. Maybe you picked the wrong career. Your RIVAL smugly
informs you that they sexed with 90% accuracy today. Later you find the
master chicken sexer left today’s performance reviews unguarded and are
tempted to swap yours and your RIVAL’s. If you do so, roll to determine
the outcome.
Hell Week. Your skin crawls and your nerves are frayed as you endure one
grueling all day shift after another. You sex a deluge of chickens in a
daze, your conscious mind retreating from the overwhelming assault. Your
subconscious takes over and you proceed on autopilot, in a chicken
sexing fugue. Roll to determine whether you succeed.
You feel a tingling in your belly: the feeling of your intuition growing
stronger. You are learning to listen to it. You hear its voice more
clearly. It is growing inside you, the expert chicken sexer you will one
day become.
You are an advanced beginner. You smugly look back at where you were
when you started and scoff at your former self with your smooth,
unwrinkled brain. So incapable of thinking the advanced thoughts that
your many-wrinkled brain now thinks. You were a baby then.
You are teetering dangerously on the edge of a precipice, a breakthrough
of great magnitude before you. Understanding is within your reach if you
are willing to take the plunge.
Your competence is established fact. You no longer require constant
supervision, and routinely sex chickens on your own with only occasional
check-ins from the master sexer.
Your RIVAL challenges you to a sex off! Roll to determine the outcome.
The loser is humiliated, and the winner rises in the esteem of the
master sexer.
In addition to perfecting your own chicken sexing, you are also tasked
with mentoring one of the crop of novices. They look like stupid little
babies. You can’t believe you were ever that young and inexperienced.
You catch your RIVAL making a mistake. Do you find compassion and help
them, or take vengeance and delight in their failure?
There is a big difference between knowledge and awareness. For the
chicken sexer, knowledge is attainable through hard work and dedication.
But awareness is beyond even the master’s grasp. It is a known and
well-documented unknown.
You hear news that the Black Turtle chicken sexing school was wholly
consumed in a freak blue lava incident. Of the five great and ancient
schools of chicken sexing, only yours and the Moon Rabbit schools
remain. Gone are former glory days of chicken sexing.
You are recognized for your contributions to the advancement of chicken
sexing. You perfect an experimental procedure for double
sexing, a technique which is named after you and widely adopted in
the chicken sexing community.
You ascend to a mythic level of chicken sexing, layering instinct on top
of intuition: with reasonable certainty, you can intuit the sex of a
chicken before even looking.
The student becomes the teacher. You have completed your training. But
this is only the beginning for you. You slowly write Expert
Freelance Chicken Sexer at the top of your resume and buy a plane
ticket. To where? Why, into the bright, bright future.
AFTERWARD
All modern livestock farming practices are inhumane, unethical, and
immoral.
Biological sex is more complicated than many of us realize. The
intersex community is largely overlooked and deserves a stronger voice
and more representation.
