When I was a young boy, my father had a habit of teasing us children mercilessly, by frequently prefacing something with the words, “When I was a little girl…..” We would try to argue with him insisting that he had never been a little girl, but a little boy. “How do you know?” he would reply. “You weren’t there.” Years later, I sometimes made the same claim with my two daughters, with the same predictable response. They knew I was only teasing - as an adult man, it was impossible for me to have been a little girl.

Of course, they were right, and also wrong. I never was a little girl, but for some other adult men, the claim would be true. One of my friends is a woman who was indeed a little boy, and another is now a man who was once a little girl. Gender transitions are a fact of life. In the modern world, this is sometimes accompanied by reassignment surgery, but non-surgical gender transitions have been an important feature of many human societies in history and the modern world, and also in the animal kingdom.

In California, an imaginative classroom lesson on gender diversity among animals, using the examples of fish that change gender, all-female gecko species and “boy snakes that act ‘girly’ , has provoked an outcry from the religious right:

Transgender Clownfish Raises a Stink at Oakland Elementary School

At Oakland’s Redwood Heights Elementary school, a cute and seemingly harmless lesson on gender diversity has provoked the religious right in to action. The hour-long lesson, part of a requirement that all state schools take on the subjects of gender identity and sexual orientation, used examples from nature to illustrate to fourth and fifth graders that things can be more complicated than just boys versus girls. Unfortunately that’s what the Pacific Justice Institute, defenders of your religious freedom to deny what you saw on the National Geographic Channel, have latched on to.

According to Katy Murphy, education reporter for the Contra Costa Times, school administrators invited parents to attend teacher training along with representatives from Gender Spectrum, the nonprofit that created the lesson plan. Although those training sessions happened several weeks ago, the Pacific Justice Institute waited until late last week to send out their incendiary press release, “Oakland Elementary School Teaches Pupils That There Are More Than Two Genders”.

Naturally, Fox News and USA Today latched on to the headline and showed up to sit in on yesterday’s lesson about the many wonders of the animal kingdom.

SFist.

Much of the standard religious right arguments against any kind of gender or sexual non-conformity are based on the assumption that God created only two genders, that we all fit neatly into one or the other, and that we must pair up in male-female couples. The lessons of the real world, as this teacher has demonstrated, are that “It ain’t necessarily so”. (The lessons of scripture in fact say the same, when read without the usual heteronormative assumptions, but that is another matter).

Joan Roughgarden is a professional evolutionary biologist who has a strong personal interest in animal gender diversity: she is herself a woman who once once a little boy, who has combined her professional and personal interests in her book, “Evolution’s Rainbow “. In it she discusses examples of animal gender and sexual diversity. In the LGBT community, “trans” can mean different things: full surgical gender reassignment, gender transition without surgery, or the various forms of cross-dressing. Remarkably, each of these has parallels in some animal species. There are birds which adopt the plumage associated with their non-biological sex (equivalent to cross-dressing), there are animals which adopt counter-intuitive gender roles (male sea - horses carry the embryos in their pouches, male pipefish carry the embryos on their underside), and there are several species, especially of fish, that undergo complete gender reassignment (but without the need for surgery. For these fish species, gender reassignment is a completely natural process).

The specific fish that was used to illustrate the Oakland lesson was the clownfish.

These fish live among the tentacles of sea anemones…… An anemone has space for only one pair of adult clown fish and a few juveniles.

The female is larger than the male. If she is removed, the remaining male turns into a female, and one of the juveniles matures into a male.

The Oakland teacher could have gone much further than simply discussing how one fish can change from male to female: there are other species with more than two genders. The bluehead wrasse has three:

One gender consists of individuals who begin life as a male and remain so for life. Another consists of individuals who begin as females and later change into males. These sex changed males are larger than those who have been male from the beginning. The third gender consists of females who remain female.

There are still other species where individuals have both genders at the same time, or which undergo gender transitions not once, but several times, criss-crossing between genders. It’s not only fish who show multiple genders - Roughgarden describes how white-throated sparrows of Ontario Canada have four, and the side-blotched lizard of the American West and South - West has five. And yes, there are species of lizards and geckoes which are exclusively female, with no need for males in procreation, and there are snake species in which some males at the start of the breeding season adopt behaviour which is usually characteristic of females - behaviour which has featured in several popular wildlife documentaries.

So, the lesson presented did no more than provide some kids with important facts from the world of nature. But the conservatives are unhappy.

Critics, however, were unmoved by that explanation, claiming the lesson does not represent the values of most Oakland residents.

“This instruction does not represent the values of the majority of families in Oakland,” attorney Kevin Snider of the Pacific Justice Institute said in a written statement. “Though to many this may seem extreme, based upon some of the bills now pending in the Capitol, such as SB 48, this will be the new normal in California’s K-12 public schools.”

Brad Dacus, president of The Pacific Justice Institute, told Fox News that three families chose to keep their kids home that day.

Fox News

For these people, their received “values” are more important than giving their children access to facts. In their world, prejudice wins out over reality. But the facts are clear: like heterosexuality, the binary gender model isn’t normal, it’s just common - and much less common than the social conservatives and religious wingnuts would have us believe.

 

Books:

 

Bagemihl, Bruce: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

Roughgarden, Joan: Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People,

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• Exclusive Homosexuality Unnatural?
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• Wingnut Alarms Go Off Over School’s Transgender Clownfish Lesson (Towleroad)
• Sandoval Signs Transgender Job Discrimination Bill (Las Vegas Review Journal)