As long as there have been Nazis. It’s a natural enmity. Today I learned about Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, two non-binary people who battled the Germans in occupied Jersey.

Lucy Schwob is better known by their pseudonym, Claude Cahun, and Suzanne Malherbe by her pseudonym, Marcel Moore. Theirs was a creative partnership, as well as romantic. Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, writer, and sculptor, while Moore was an illustrator and designer.

Cahun is the more renowned of the pair. She used her work to challenge notions of identity and gender with androgynous self-portraits that bring to life an array of characters. In one, she’s a bodybuilder holding barbells and hearts drawn on their cheeks; in another, she’s a lady of the manor swathed in velvet. Her work is a playful clash of the masculine and feminine, but also a critique of the societal norms she spent her life refusing to adhere to.

Cahun believed that gender was transmutable. Assuming different identities was her forte, and she regularly performed in avant-garde theatre in 1920s Paris (experts still refer to her using feminine pronouns, but it is likely she would have identified as non-binary today). Moore would create the costumes that Cahun would wear to tread the boards. A forerunner of the modern artist, Cindy Sherman, she was ahead of her time in more ways than one.

They were also uncommonly brave.

Three years after her arrival, on June 30, 1940, the Germans invaded. The islanders knew early on that Jersey was likely to be occupied – 6,600 fled on evacuation ships – but Cahun and Moore chose to stay. “They’d spent their entire lives resisting authority, so this was an opportunity to be part of the resistance on the island,” says Downie.

Together, the pair created a two-person resistance campaign, with the main focus being what they called their “traps”. Cahun would draft notes addressed to the German troops, which Moore would translate into German, signing them ‘Der Soldat Ohne Namen’ (‘The Soldier Without a Name’).

Their aim was to inspire dissension amongst the troops by pointing out the idiocy of war. Professor Shaw says they would do it in a cryptic way, using poetry, reminiscent of the surrealist sensibility: “It wasn’t like propaganda telling you ‘Here’s what you need to do’, it spurred the soldiers to think their own thoughts about it.” They would catch the bus into St Helier, disguised as old ladies to deliver the messages, placing them on parked cars and inside cigarette packets. They kept as quiet as they could about their resistance – not even their housekeeper suspected them.

Subversive poetry is a perfectly legitimate means of resistance. It bothered the Nazis enough that when they were captured after four years of making nuisances of themselves, they were sentenced to death — they were only spared because the Allies were timely in their liberation of island ports and the French mainland.

Hooray for courageous weirdos!

I haven’t watched it in years — decades, even — and that’s my excuse for not knowing about its sexist culture.

Shark Week, a celebration of sharks on the Discovery Channel that attracts millions of viewers, is marine science’s premiere annual television event—and it rarely features women scientists or scientists of color in leading roles. Many women I’ve spoken to were passionate viewers as children, but when they became scientists, found “it wasn’t what it used to be, or what I remembered it to be,” said Carlee Jackson, a co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS). Another scientist told me that Shark Week stopped feeling “pure,” to her, because she increasingly “saw it through a lens tainted by sexism … and I wonder what would be different if I’d had a positive, inclusive experience in science from the start.”

To call shark science a “boy’s club” is an understatement—although more than 60 percent of graduate students in my field are women, the vast majority of senior scientists are white men. During my research talk at my first shark science conference, a senior male scientist was so rude and aggressive during the question period that another male scientist apologized for him afterward, telling me “he does that to a female graduate student every year or two”. I have seen it happen to others since; at least one woman he targeted left the podium in tears.

For years, the annual conference “officially” ended at the beginning of the closing banquet so organizers wouldn’t be responsible for what came next. “Next” included a fundraiser in which scantily clad female graduate students were expected to parade auction items around the room, a dinner at which one senior scientist demanded to sit with only the “prettiest” students, and an alcohol-fueled mixer where women needed to be on constant guard against roaming hands. The first male Ph.D. student who volunteered to display auction items to help his female colleagues had his rear laughingly slapped by a male senior scientist “for old time’s sake.” A photograph from a past meeting shows a senior scientist with his hands between the legs of two women graduate students, lifting them off the ground—one of them smiling, the other appearing on the verge of tears.

Uh, what?

I’ve been to post-conference shindigs in my fields of study, and they’ve been relatively benign (given that as a man, there may have been undercurrents to which I was stupidly oblivious), but they’ve never this ridiculously sexist. It helps that most of those fields, developmental biology and now spider biology, have been filled with a woman majority, but then marine biology is similarly popular with women. I guess one difference is that we’ve never had a wealthy influencer, like a whole cable TV channel, tilting the playing field and fueling bias with unwarranted favoritism for male presenters.

Read the whole article and be appalled. One disappointment, though, is that none of the assholes (the best term for the men described in that quote) get named, and that’s a shame, but understandable. They’ve still got the power. Nothing has changed to make the power differential shift, so a woman calling them out is going to get an absurd amount of shit showered down on her. But jesus, shark researchers of any gender: next time you see a senior man browbeating a woman graduate student, or fondling her, or asking her to parade around in skimpy clothing, say something. Make it unacceptable to behave that way. If you want to be an ally, don’t acquiesce.

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And yet another reason!

“He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks,” Daniels told In Touch Weekly, again recounting Trump watching “Shark Week.” “He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities, and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was, like, riveted. He was, like, obsessed.”