Animals are queer and trans too. Get over it!

There are animals with only one sex, animals that change sex, animals with female looking males and male looking females, animals who have same-sex sex, and gay animal couples who raise young ones. Welcome to the real world of sex and gender!

“Natural” and “normal” are some of the favorite words of transphobes and homophobes. Same sex desires and shifting genders are only found among humans, they say, and is caused by LGBT+ propaganda or sexual perversions.

Animals, on the other hand, are gender pure, where male conquers females and make small cubs og kittens or whatever.

What is weird is that pet owners may also stick to this narrative, even if their bitch (that is a dog, mind you) tries to mount another bitch or Fido tries to hump the leg of uncle Fred.

Sometimes it helps not be able to see what is really going on out there. Not far from where I live you will find a species of flycatcher where the males come in to “morphs” or forms, one female looking and one male looking. Most mistakes the “feminine” males for females, I suspect, so this gender variance is basically invisible.

The North American bluegill sunfish has no less than three male genders, of different sizes and different colors and markings.

Justin Rhodes at the University of Illinois, documents that male clownfish are able to seamlessly transition to females in the event that the single dominant female dies. There is always only one female, and she was once male.

There are also female only species around, like the New Mexico whiptail, species of lizard found in the southwestern United States in New Mexico and Arizona, and in northern Mexico in Chihuahua.

In the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen biologist Anna Blix followed up a comment from a politician who stated that “only cows give birth, regardless of what the bull thinks”.

Blix pointed out that among seahorses it is the male that gives birth to the young, not the female. Blix also noted that reproduction based on sperm connecting with ova is just one of many. The fungus schizophyllum commune has 23000 distinct sexes. (I’m not kidding.)

A Giraffe’s Point of View points out that there are over 1500 animal species in which same-sex sexual behavior is documented:

“That raises a question in the minds of many: what purpose does it serve? From an evolutionary standpoint, it seems disadvantageous to the procreation of the species, and should anyways be a recessive trait. Shouldn’t queer animals simply die out, never to be seen again?

Nature has disproved that theory over millennia, and non-heterosexual behavior has been documented in animals since the year 384 BCE!

Of late, scientists have also started discovering that the gender spectrum exists in animals too. By not conforming to the human stereotypical notions of sexuality and gender, many species are able to gain increased fertility, a higher position in the social hierarchy, and even raise offspring abandoned by the biological parents.”

So what’s the point? The ideas that biological sex and gendered behavior have to be strictly binary is a human made idea. Nature does not care. The idea that all sexual activity has to lead to procreation is also bogus. Sexuality has a lot of other functions, including social bonding and having fun.

Blix simply concludes that you cannot use biology to dismiss transgender identities.

And why should we let biology decide what’s right or wrong, anyway? If that was the right approach, all types of medicine would be immoral, and killing your neighbor would be OK.

Originally published at https://trans-express.lgbt.