Why is it so hard for a scientist like Richard Dawkins to understand the difference between sex and gender?

Richard Dawkins find it hard to grasp the difference between gender and biological sex, reducing gender identity to a matter of procreation in the process. No wonder he is loved by transphobic TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).

Richard Dawkins is now actively helping anti-trans activists. How can such a renowned scientist end up in such a bad place?

Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Ray Blanchard all belong to what I would call a school of traditional gender role thinking masquerading as science based facts. 

If  you go through their arguments it soon becomes clear that the statement "gender is biological sex" is simply a rephrasing of the sentence "biological sex is biological sex and biological sex," which explains nothing. But this is clearly about reproduction. Gender is reduced to sperm and eggs. They cannot grasp reality of the concept of gender as something related to, but still different from, biological sex. 

Dawkins discusses trans people with a gender critical TERF

In the video below, where Dawkins discusses transgender identities with Helen Joyce,  Dawkins find it "distinctly weird that people can simply declare that 'I am a woman, though I have a penis'". He sees this as "a strange distortion of language."

Transgender people, evolution and sexual mimicry

 Are trans and queer behaviors examples of "sexual mimicry"? 

Anonymous asked me the following over at tumblr:

"Sexual mimicry occurs when one sex mimics the opposite sex in its behavior, appearance, or chemical signalling. It is more commonly seen within invertebrate species, although sexual mimicry is also seen among vertebrates such as spotted hyenas. Sexual mimicry is commonly used as a mating strategy to gain access to a mate, a defense mechanism to avoid more dominant individuals, or a survival strategy."

Thoughts?

Gender variance in the animal kingdom

The concept of sexual mimicry is an attempt by some evolutionary biologist to explain gender variance in the animal kingdom.

I know of many female dogs who will gladly hump a bitch in heat. Heck, they may even embrace a human leg in order to get attention or whatever it is female dogs try to achieve by this kind of behavior. It might not be sexual at all in that context. 

Do animals have genders? Are there transgender animals? A scientist find some clues among chimpanzees.

Some people are trying to reduce gender to biological sex, appealing to “common sense” or even “science”. This is one way of dismissing gender variance and transgender people. The fact is that gender is a common term used in animal studies.

To simplify: In biology biological sex in animals most often refers to gonads (sperm or eggs), while gender refers to either (1) their behavior and (2) different variants of a specific biological sex. 

(In some animals males and females (as defined by sperm/eggs) may come in different “morphs” or phenotypes. There may be two distinct types of males, for instance, with different body types. Let us leave that aside for now.)

Traditionally the difference between sex and gender has been explained as sex being “biological” and gender “cultural”.

Frans de Waal, one of the world’s leading primatologists, do not see it exactly this way. For him gender is the end result of an interplay between biology and culture. This is also the case for apes like chimpanzees and bonobos, and – as he sees – also humans.

This presentation is based on his new book  Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, and some of his recent articles.

What does the word "gender" really mean?

The main problem with the term gender is that it is not referring to one phenomenon only, but many. It is this ambiguity of language that makes discussions so confusing. But it also this complexity that makes the topic so interesting. 

The reason for this ambiguity is that the language most people use today has been developed within a culture that requires you think of male and female as "natural" and mutually exclusive. Moreover, these concepts of male and female are supposed to determine everything you are or can do.

However, reality does not care. Nature does not care. And everyone violates these rules on a daily basis. Everyone!

Here are the most important phenomena referred to as "gender":

Biological sex

Biological sex refers to what is called "gametes", as in sperm and egg. Gametes are real, so biological sex is real. 

Still, the two sexes are not mutually exclusive. Nature throws a lot of dice that comes up intersex, with different chromosomes (as in XY women and XX men) and a wide variety of ambiguous genitalia and sex characteristics.

Many species reproduced by way of gametes, as in human sperm an eggs. Other species have other ways of continuing the species.

By the way: Not even post-modernist gender philosophers deny the existence of gametes.  They are simply pointing out that our understanding of what the existence of biological sex means for our daily lives is colored by culture, and that the scientists themselves are also influenced by culture when they develop and present their theories. 

They are right about this, and scientists may also change their views based on new concepts and new ideals developed elsewhere. Homosexuality and gender dysphoria are, for instance, no longer seen as mental illnesses.  

Note also the way transphobes try to present  the statement "gender is the same as biological sex" as science. That statement represents, at best, 19th century science. I know of no serious scientists today – whether they come from the natural sciences or from the social ones – that argue that the complexity of cultural gender can be reduced to gametes, genitalia or chromosomes. 

Cultural gender

Throughout the ages various cultures have created an insane number of social rules as to how men and women should dress and behave. A Roman man would not be caught dead in trousers. Most cis/het American men today will not be seen in a toga ("Eeeeek! A dress!!!)

Why are Trans People Trans?

What makes trans people trans? A lot of theories have been presented, and few of them survive the test of time. Currently the dominant model is what I have called the Rainbow Model, where a transgender identity is seen as the end product of a complex interplay of factors, some of them biological. In this three parter, I look at several approaches to explaining what makes trans people trans.

Tailcalled, who has been taken active part in the "autogynhephilia" debate over at reddit, has invited me to an online debate about what makes trans people trans. I can do that. We have agreed that we will both publish a blog post giving some pointers as to how see the "etiology" (cause) of transgender identities, as starting points for our discussion.

This is my blog post. Tailcalled's one can be found here.

So the question is: What makes trans people trans?

Sounds easy, doesn't it? All we have to do is to find some relevant scientific papers and take it from there. But it is not that easy. Not that I am dismissing the role of science in such a debate. I have been writing about this kind of research since 2009. 

The problem is that science is not a kind of platform where you can look at transgender lives with purely objective and disinterested eyes. Scientists are as human as the rest of us, and their preconceptions and prejudices directs their research questions and the way they conceptualize what makes trans people trans. 

Even the terms we use are fluid and ambiguous, because they have to be as we move through a cultural shift where traditional ideas about sexuality and gender are being questioned along a wide front. That is, as I see it, a very good thing, but it makes it harder for people to discuss this topic, as people from different communities have different life experiences and understand the relevant words in different ways.

Debunking the female brain vs. male brain myth (and why it is not as easy as it might seem)

Lise Eliot is out with a new interesting article on the idea that the brain is gendered (i.e. different between men and women). She refers to a new meta-study of research on biological research that, as she sees it, shows that there is no difference between male and female brains beyond size.

I am a big fan of Lise Eliot, who is  a Professor of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in the US of A. 

Her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It taught me a lot about modern neuroscience, and how some scientists takes a too simplistic approach to how our feeling of being gendered is created.

I would argue, though, that the arguments she makes against this part of neuroscience does not prove that there is no biological component to gender identity and that transgender identities therefore must be purely psychological. More about that below.

Mars vs. Venus

In a new article over at Fast Company she writes:

Everyone knows the difference between male and female brains. One is chatty and a little nervous, but never forgets and takes good care of others. The other is calmer, albeit more impulsive, but can tune out gossip to get the job done.

These are stereotypes, of course, but they hold surprising sway over the way actual brain science is designed and interpreted. Since the dawn of MRI [Magnetic resonance imaging, used for brain scans], neuroscientists have worked ceaselessly to find differences between men’s and women’s brains. This research attracts lots of attention because it’s just so easy to try to link any particular brain finding to some gender difference in behavior.

But as a neuroscientist long experienced in the field, I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences. And what I found, with the help of excellent collaborators, is that virtually none of these claims has proven reliable.

Is it possible for your true gender to change over time?

 

I got this question over at tumblr:

Is it possible for your gender to really Change?

Like instead of just unlocking your true identity (an oversimplification), is it possible for your gender identity to have shifted over time instead of just having been the One True Gender (or lack of gender) the whole time?

Here's my response:

There is much that is unknown about how gender identities are formed. The current scientific consensus seems to be that a stable gender identity appears relatively early in life, at around 3 years old at the latest, and that it is caused by an interplay between different factors.

Genes play a part, but there is no single “gender identity gene”. Many genes are involved in the development of both biological sex and the experience of “being gendered”.

Studies of identical twins show that if one is transgender, the chances of the other one being trans too, is much higher than pure chance would allow for. But there are a lot of cases where one is cis and another is trans, which tells me that although genes are part of the explanation, they do not tell the whole story.

Hormones seem to play an important part, especially in the womb, where the production of hormones and the cells’ ability to “read” these hormones, influence the development of both body and brain.

Your own personal life story definitely shape the way you understand your own gender identity. Culture and the social dynamics are therefore also important factors.

An alternative hypothesis for the evolution of same-sex sexual behavior in animals

An article in The Washington Post presents a new approach to same-sex relationships in animals (and humans, by implication). Researchers argue that heterosexuality is a pretty recent invention, as far as evolution is concerned.

When Procreation is a God

Traditionally homosexual or bisexual practices have been seen as deviations that need to be explained. The premise is that sex is for pro-creation, so same-sex sex makes no sense. Why does not evolution eradicate such behavior, given that it does not lead to offspring?

Ray Blanchard, the man behind the transphobic  autogynephilia theory is, for instance,  deeply anchored in this way of thinking. He has spent a lot of time trying to explain why homosexuals exists. Moreover, he presents both homosexuality and transgender conditions as mental illnesses, again because they – presumably – do not lead to procreation.

(Why “evolutionary psychologists” have decided to make procreation God and the ruler over right and wrong will have to be addressed at another time. It makes little sense to me.)

Same-sex behavior is the starting point

The report presented in the Washington Post takes a completely different approach. Polysexuality might just as well be the natural default, if I understand the researchers correctly. Same-sex behavior has always been there.

What Japanese monkeys can teach you about sex and perversions

We are at the end of the year, and Japanese macaques monkeys have come crossdreamers to the rescue, effectively undermining some 150 years of hard sexological work aimed at separating  good people from the sexual perverts.

Japanese macaque monkey. (Photo: vichie81)

A basic tenet of sexology, especially of the so-called "evolutionary psychology" type, is that sex is for procreation, men are sexual predators who would sleep with anyone anytime to spread their seed, and women are timid and asexual beings, protecting their eggs while waiting for the evolutionary fit Mr. Perfect -- the so-called Alpha Male.

Since these are traits based in biology and nature, the same researchers have also been projecting this ideal on other animals, finding "proof" in studies of chimpanzees, penguins and what not.

This logic has obviously also been used to invalidate gender variant and transgender people, effectively reducing their crossdreaming (i.e. the dream of becoming their target sex) to a misdirected sexual impulse: a fetish and/or a sexual perversion ("paraphilia").

Monkey do

The Japanes macaques have not read the paraphilia memo, because members of one tribe has been found to be using  nearby deers for sexual pleasure. It seems the relationship is consensual. The researchers are not sure what the deer get out of this, but deer who do not like this kind of attention can easily shake the monkeys off. In fact, they have been known to do so.

The researchers explain that the observations were conducted on the two free-ranging groups of Japanese macaques living in the Meiji Memorial Forest of Minoo Quasi-National Park, an unfenced
forested area located on the outskirts of Minoo City, Osaka Prefecture, in central Japan.

This is how the study is presented in scieneese:

This is the first quantitative study of heterospecific sexual behavior between a non-human primate and a non-primate species. We observed multiple occurrences of free-ranging adolescent female Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) performing mounts and sexual solicitations toward sika deer (Cervus nippon) at Minoo, central Japan. Our comparative description of monkey-deer versus monkey-monkey interactions supported the “heterospecific sexual behavior” hypothesis: the mounts and demonstrative solicitations performed by adolescent female Japanese macaques toward sika deer were sexual in nature.

No, trans women are not men and trans men are not women

You meet them online, you meet them in various social settings: The people who think that gender is so simple that it is only a matter of what’s between your legs. Here is my response to one such individual.

Photo: Visivasnc

 “Transwomen are male, Transmen are female, there is nothing wrong with that fact at all.”

I hear this argument over and over again: "Men are men, and women are women. It is simple!"

No, this is not simple.

In this context I normally hear one of three explanations for what male and female are:

1. It is about genitalia -- taken as a sign of biological sex.
(The reality is much more complex, by the way. Many are born with ambiguous genitalia)

2.. It is about chromosomes -- XX is female, XY is male.
(This is not true either, there are intersex XX males and XY females who live as -- and identify with -- their assigned gender).

3. It is all about upbringing and socialization 
(Nope: The fundamental gender identity rarely changes even if you are raised as the opposite sex.)

Transgender feelings are real, regardless of what is causing them

In spite of genitalia, chromosomes and upbringing. In spite of a culture that harasses and ridicules gender variance (and in particular femininity and female identities in those assigned male). In spite of societies that reward men richly for playing the manly game: There they are, trans people who dream, long and desperately need to live their lives as the gender they feel they are. 

They did not ask for this mismatch. Most of them would give a lot not to feel this way. But they do and it does not go away.  For many of them this is a matter of life and death. The attempted suicide rate among transgender people is 40 percent. You do not try to kill yourself unless you are experiencing something very, very real.

In other words: The very existence of transgender men and women, the very people you try to invalidate, proves that you are wrong.

Literature on sex and gender differences

My blog post on the statistical differences between men and women has caused a lively debate.

One reader even implies that this is yet another male rapist plot to suppress women.

Below you will find some of the studies I have made use of when preparing the blog post. They are all reflections on  the cultural bias of modern biological sex and gender research.

Note that all the books are written by women.  It says a lot about the toxicity of the current sex and gender debate that an argument based on feminist thinking can be interpreted as a male attack against women.

Studies of science

Anne Fausto-Sterling: Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality

Anne Fausto-Sterling: Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men

Cordelia Fine: Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

Lise Eliot: Pink Brain, Blue Brain - How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps

Female to male crossdressing among red deer

Another look at the lives of animals, and how biology may influence sex identity and sexual orientation.

I found this photo in a wonderful book called The Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure.

It depicts a female red deer mounting a male stag in a frenzy of sexual rut.

The caption in the book reads:

"Red deer (Cervus elaphus), Richmond Park, London, England. As members of harem species -- in which the strongest and the fittest males amass a herd of does and try to prevent other bucks from mating with them -- deer are often portrayed as sexually agressive males and passive females. This amorous hind mounting a stag shows that the females are not as passive or indifferent as we are often led to believe. Photo: Elliot Neep."

My point is actually not that this is an example of a female to male crossdreaming deer (an "autoandrocervophiliac". You have to excuse me - the headline was just to tempting to write). I have, of course,  no way of knowing whether this female is dreaming about being the male  boss of her own harem.

But this instance show that there are no absolute clear cut boundaries between male and female sexuality and behavior among red deer, so maybe we should be a little bit more careful about what we call natural and unnatural among us humans.

Strange animals

As I noted in my series on Roughgarden, animals display a wide variety of sexual behavior -- behavior that seriously deviate from the "male conquers female to secure the survival of his genes" kind of narrative.

This week BBC presented new research on zebra finches, which shows that same-sex pairs of monogamous birds are just as attached and faithful to each other as those paired with a member of the opposite sex.

What is feminine and masculine anyway?

On this blog I have been using words like masculine and feminine quite liberally. After all, that should make sense, given that crossdreaming is a transgender phenomenon, and boys who dreams about being girls should have a pretty good idea about what that entails.

I have gradually come to the conclusion, however, that I have no longer a clue about to what these two words really mean.

Femininity defined

Dictionaries are of no help, as they have a tendency of defining

a term like "feminine" as "associated with women and not with men", or -- if they are very advanced -- giving it a culturally relativistic definition: "Femininity (also called womanliness) refers to qualities and behaviors judged by a particular culture to be ideally associated with or especially appropriate to women and girls."

There are several reasons for my problem.

Gender equality

One is the fact that I have grown up in Scandinavia.

I have seen the "qualities and behaviours" of women change before my own eyes. Women not only have the right to vote, they practically run the place. Four out of six Norwegian party leaders are now women. The Conservative Party and the right wing Progressives are both run by what was once the "weaker sex". When Mrs. Gro Harlem Brundland ran the place, we had worried young boys asking their mothers if it was possible for men to become Prime Minister.

Women were traditionally supposed to be non-intellectual, emotional, passive and caring and completely unsuited for leadership. Men, on the other hand, had apparently no aptitude for child care.

It is strange to see how Norwegians now consider the willingness to take care of your kids to be as much a masculine trait as a feminine one. Fathers are expected to spend time at home with their new born child during the first year of its life. When I grew you rarely saw a man push a stroller.

The flexibility of language

Still, this is not only about changing gender roles. This is also a question of perception and language.

When I grew up, the traditional core family continued to be the norm. Middle class women stayed at home in a Mad Men kind of way.

That being said, people were pretty flexible when it came to determining to what extent one could call a man a man.

I remember my uncle Thomas and aunt Ragna very well. Thomas was a very small man with a weak disposition. He never talked loudly (if he talked at all) and was very nervous among -- well -- anyone. He was a businessman, although not a very successful one, as he lacked the kind of aggressiveness and stamina required to succeed.

He might have been the boss back home, but every body knew, to quote Woody Allen, that mom made all the decisions. Ragna was a formidable woman, a big and strong primary school teacher who faced no disciplinary problems what so ever. She had a strong willed personality and a lot of opinions about anything. She was the aggressive boss. He was the submissive partner.

But they clearly loved each other, an no one doubted the fact that she was a

woman and he was a man. No one would call her masculine or him feminine. And I believe the reason for this was they had four kids. They were as heterosexual as you get.

I am sure may uncle and aunt both faced problems when growing up. He was probably teased for his "effeminacy", while she was reprimanded for sticking her neck out. But in the end they were both accepted.

The eternal bachelor had it much harder. He was considered feminine even when he was not.

Here's my point: If you had asked them about what feminine and masculine meant I am pretty sure they would have repeated the stereotypes of the day: "Women are emotional and caring, men are aggressive and dominant." And they would do so even if they themselves behaved differently.

And as for the gay bachelor: He was turned on by men, wasn't he? And if you were turned on by men you were feminine by definition, even if you had the body and beard of a fisher man.

My mother definitely believed that women had a natural capacity for infinite love, but the fact is that the only person that had this quality in our house was my father. He was the caring introvert. She was the aggressive power player.

Hence there seems to be no connection between what people believe they believe and how they actually act.

The evolutionary advantages of feminine men and masculine women

In an earlier post I noted that crossdreamers ("autogynephiliacs", men who dream about being women) may actually be at an evolutionary advantage. I criticized Joan Roughgarden for not doing the obvious: exploring the possible social and evolutionary role of the crossdreamer within her theory of social selection.

(If the sentence above makes absolutely no sense to you, do read the post about Roughgarden and autogynephilia.)

---

UPDATE ON TERMINOLOGY

Since this blog post was written I have stopped using the terms "autogynephilia" and "autoandrophilia" to describe people. The reason for this is that the terms implicitly communicates an explanation for why some people get aroused by imagining themselves as the opposite sex . This explanation, that this is some kind of autoerotic paraphilia,  is both wrong and stigmatizing. Instead I use the neutral term "crossdreamers".

---

Bailey and the feminine man

It turns out I am not the only one who has looked into this possibility. I have found a paper written by J. Michael Bailey and his friends, where they try to explain how homosexuality can survive as a genetic trait. Homosexuals are, after all, less likely to get offspring.

Their hypothesis is that there are other family members that get some -- but not all -- of the same genes. These are feminine, but heterosexual men, who for some reason have more sexual partners than the average Joe, and who are therefore able to spread their seed more liberally.

Notice the irony in all of this. Roughgarden has really nothing good to say about Bailey -- the man who popularized the autogynephilia (AGP) concept in his "Queen" book. But here he is, presenting a theory that fits well with Roughgarden's new approach.

Gay animals

Part four in a series about sex, gender and nature. In this post I look at the  world of gay animals.

The very popular documentary movie The March of the Penguins from 2005 was used by Christian fundamentalists to prove that in God's nature animals are heterosexual and monogamous. They had long argued that homosexuality was unnatural, and here was the proof.

The problem is that there is a lot of same-sex action among penguins. Same-sex behavior has been observed in close to 1500 species, and is well documented for 500 of them. There is in general a lot of "gay" animals.

All right, make note of the quotation marks. To use words like "gay" and "homosexual" when it comes to animals is complicated, as those words have a lot of human connotations that do not necessarily fit other species (or other human cultures for that matter).

Still, it makes sense to look at the phenomenon of same-sex sexuality among animals, because it broadens the scope of what can be considered "natural" in the original sense of the word.

What causes "homosexual" behavior among animals?

Sexual selection theory consider same-sex behavior a mistake, a deception or a disease caused by genes that decrease fitness in one sex but increase fitness in the other.

Among more "positive" theories we find indirect insemination, male over male domination, and "the practice hypothesis" (they are training for the real thing). Then there is the "sexually antagonistic selection" hypothesis: same-sex behaviour in males are favoured by selection because they increase the reproductive chances of their daughters.

Female Laysan albatrosses from Hawaii. Over 30 percent of the nesting pairs consist of two females. "They engage in mutual preening and even occasionally copulation, and, like female-male pairs, each year they raise a single chick." (Research by Lindsay Young, ref. New Scientist, Photo: Tui De Roy/Minden Pictures/FLPA)

Professor Joan Roughgarden over at Stanford, on the other hand, considers homosexuality a positive and natural thing in and for itself:

"Homosexuality, together with mutual grooming, preening, sleeping, tongue rubbing, and interlocking vocalization allows animals to work together as a team -- to coordinate actions and tacitly to sense one another's welfare." (2009, p. 245)

In other words, animals -- like humans -- use sex for bonding.

Macho gay big horns and effeminate straight rams

In Evolution's Rainbow Roughgarden describes many species with same-sex behavior. I am not going to go through all of them here, but find the macho big horn sheep of North America so fascinating that I just have to give you a taste of what the book has to offer.

The male and female big horn sheep are only together during the breeding season. A female is receptive only for three days and will not be mounted outside of these three days. The males solve this lack of sex by forming "homosexual societies". Almost all males participate in same-sex courting and anal copulation!

The few males who do not take part in this activity are known as "effeminate" males among big horn researchers. They look like the other males, but prefer to stay with the ewes:

These males do not dominate females, are less aggressive overall, and adopt a crouched, female urination posture. These males refuse mounting by other males.

As Roughgarden points out, this case turns the meanings of normal and aberrant upside down. In this case the researchers believe the effeminate male must suffer from some kind of hormone deficiency, in spite of the fact that they look the same as the masculine males:

"Now, why would being straight be a pathology, requiring a hormone checkup?" Roughgarden asks sarcastically. "According to the researchers, what's aberrant is that a macho-looking bighorn ram acts feminine! He pees like a female -- even worse than being gay!" (2004, p. 138)

The bonobo - our pansexual sibling

Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and the bonobos (or pygmy chimpanzees, Pan paniscus). We share 96 percent of our genes with them.

Chimpanzees behave the way they should according to the sexual selection theory. The males are aggressive, the females subordinate. Among the bonobos, however, the females have the upper hand, and they use sex as a way of dissolving conflicts.

Chimpanzee matings are front to back, with the male mounting. Bonobos, on the other hand, also enjoy the missionary position, although I doubt any missionary would find their sexual habits comforting.

Image: Female bonobos having sex.
Source: Live Like Dirt

All bonobos enjoy same-sex copulations, female-female as well as male-male. The young are also invited. There is a lot of French kissing, fellatio, reciprocal male-to-male masturbation, clitoris rubbing, rump-rump contact and penis fencing.

Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting write that the most regular masturbators in their studies are adolescents and adult females (de Waal 1997, p. 104):

"The latter is significant because of yet another uniqueness claim: from Frank Beach to Desmond Morris, scientists have declared female orgasms to be exclusively human. While people readily assume males to enjoy sex, many appear skeptical about females. This reflects the puritan belief, prevalent until early this century [20th century], that sex is a man's privilege and a woman's chore."

The female orgasm is important, as it may partly explain the prominent role of the female in bonobo society. The orgasm means that the female bonobos are as motivated for sex as the males. The fact that the female bonobos are receptive almost continuously (unlike their chimpanzee sisters), also means that sex can be used as a social tool during the whole year.

The reason for all this sex is that it facilitates sharing of food, leads to reconciliation after a dispute, helps integrate new arrivals and is used in the establishment of coalitions. As for humans, reproduction is just one of many reasons for getting close.

"For example, after one male has chased another away for a female, the two may engage in a scrotal rub. Or when one female has hit a juvenile, and the juvenile's mother has come to its defense, the problem may be solved by intese GG-rubbing [genito-genital contact] between the two adults. >Based on hundreds of such incidents, my study produced the first solid evidence for sexual behavior as a mechanism to overcome social tension. " (de Waal 1997, p. 109)

Why gay?

As you can see from these two examples of "gay" animals, the sexual habits of animals vary a lot. You can not deduce one and only one explanation for same-sex relationships in all animals, nor can you use the bonobo or the big horns to explain human homosexuality (at least not directly).

But this very diversity is interesting, again because it helps us get around some of the sexual stereotypes of traditional evolutionary theory.

Why do the female bonobos enjoy each others company in this way? How can such a trait have evolved? Roughgarden points out that females maintain strong friendships with unrelated females, females control access to food, females share food with one another more often than with males, and females form alliances in which they cooperatively attack and even injure males.

"A female who doesn't participate in this social system, including same-sex sexuality, will not share in these group benefits. For a female bonobo, not being a lesbian is hazardous to your fitness." (2004, p. 150).

In this case same-sex sexuality is a social-inclusionary trait. Same-sex sexuality promotes friendship, and that may also increase survival. Given that these female bonobos also engage in "heterosexual" sex this can lead to more offspring.

It can be no question that "homosexuality" in animals is inherited, although not because of one single gene. (p. 155) And given that it can increase both fertility and survival, it does not necessarily go against evolution. (p. 156)

Now, the most important questions remain: What does all of this mean for transgendered people? That will be the topic of my final post in this series.

Here's a video with Rouggharden presenting her own theory:

Marcel Barelli‘s cartoon Dans la nature (In Nature) documents the diversity of animal sexuality and gender, proving  once and for all that nature does not care a bit about the binaries of bigots.

Litterature:

Roughgarden CV

Roughgarden, Joan: The Genial Gene, Berkeley 2009. Click here for Google Books excerpt.

Roughgarden, Joan: Evolution's Rainbow, Berkeley 2004. Click here for Google Books excerpt.

Homosexuality in animals (Wikipedia)

Susan McCarthy: The fabulous kingdom of gay animals

Bruce Bagemihl: Biological exuberance: animal homosexuality and natural diversity

Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting: Bonobo, the Forgotten Ape, Berkeley 1997. Click here for Google Books excerpt.

Transgender animals

The third part in a series about sex, gender and nature. In this post I look at the strange world of transgendered animals.

In her book Evolution's Rainbow (2004) Roughgarden has a separate chapter named "Multiple-Gender Families" which really took me by surprise.

I had heard the "Discovery Channel alpha male scaring the others males away" story so many times that I had come to believe that there are only two "genders" in the animal kingdom: male and female.

I need to make a little detour here. "Gender" is often understood to be the "socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women." (WHO) Hence gender differences are defined by culture, sex differences by biology.

Roughgarden, however, is a biologist - not a social scientist - and in her tradition it is possible to use the word gender to denote the physical basis for the behavioral differences between males and females.

Roughgarden needs the term gender in addition to the term sex, simply because many animals have several variants for one or both of the two sexes!

This came as a total surprise to me. How is it possible than no one has ever told me this extremely important fact before? The answer, of course, is that it does not fit well with the sexual selection theory.

Gender multiplicity

So what does "multiple gendered animals" or "within-sex polymorphism" mean?

Roughgarden explains it this way:

"Males and females in a species may come in two or more sizes or colors. The morphological [pertaining to the form, structure and configuration of an organism] differences are the tip of the iceberg.

"The two morphs [i.e. gender variants of a sex] approach courtship differently, have different numbers of mates, have different arrangements of between-sex and same-sex relationships, live different life spans, prefer different types of real estate for their homes, exercise different degrees of parental care, and so on." (2004, p. 75)

Here are a few examples:

Singing fish

There are hundreds of known fish species that have two distinct types of males. The Californian singing fish (Porichthys notatus), for instance, have one large and one small type of males. The large type defend territories and guard eggs. A large male guards a big collection of eggs laid by several females. The small male defend no territories. They dart in to fertilize eggs laid in the large male's territory. (p. 77)

Male red deer or elk (Cervus elaphus) has a secondary type of males that have no antlers. They may at times be more successful at mating, according to Roughgarden (p. 78).

Three types of male

The North American bluegill sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus) has no less than three male genders, of different sizes and different colors and markings. The large males try to repel the small ones from their territories. The females spawn readily with the small males while the large male is busy with all his chasing (p. 80). The medium sized males may be schooling with the females. Roghgarden continues:

"A medium male approach the territory of a large male from above in the water and descends without agression or hesitation into the large male's territory. The two males then begin a courtship turning that continues for as long as ten minutes. In the end, the medium male joins the large male, sharing the territory that the large male originally made and defends." (p. 80)

A popular way of explaining away this strange phenomenon is to say that the medium male deceives the large one into believing he is a female.

But, as Roughgarden points out, this is the male chauvinist talking. Sunfish have great eyesight, and the medium "feminine" male may be similar to females, but they are not identical.

An alternative theory is that two males may defend the territory in a better way than one, and the females appreciate this.

Roughgarden prefers a third explanation:

"A female might wonder if she will suffer domestic violence from this male who's trying to look big and powerful...Perhaps the courtship between the large male and the medium male offers the female a chance to see how the large male behave with a feminine-looking fish who is slightly smaller than she is." (p. 84)

It gets weirder!

White-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis) of Ontario have two male and two female genders! In both males and females the white-striped individuals are more aggressive than the tan-striped individuals. Still, they can all find mates.

Not to be outdone the side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana) from the American Southwest has three male types and two female.

The flycatcher

Just a few kilometers from where I live now, you will find the pied flycatcher bird (Ficedula hypoleuca). Males vary from striking black and white to brown.

I have taken the liberty of reproducing a Russian drawing of the bird. Note that there is nothing here to signify that this bird violates the rule of having two genders. Indeed, the superiority of the male is displayed by the fact that there are no less than four drawings of the "normal" male, one of the female and none of the "feminine" male.

Roughgarden presents a Norwegian experiment where male flycatchers who had set up territories were presented with individual caged birds to see if they could distinguish the sexes:

"A territory-holding male who hadn't already attracted a female reacted to a female by showing off the entrance to his hole and calling enticingly. When the same male was presented with a macho black-and-white male, he was not so hospitable, and jumped on the cage of the visitor, pecking at it, trying to attack, and not bothering with any welcoming calls. When a feminine brown male was presented, the male again showed off his nest hole and called invitingly." (2004, p. 93)

Note that the research Roughgarden bases this description on argues that "the female-like males gain an advantage because they are in control of when to initiate a fight because of the opponent's poor sex recognition ability." (Sætre and Slagsvold 1995) The masculine male is therefore fooled into believing the feminine male is a peaceful girl. The Norwegian researchers see, as most of their colleagues, violence and deceit, where Roughgarden sees collaboration and the division of labor.

Roughgarden does not believe the male flycatcher is fooled by the feminine male. The problem with deceit theories, she says, is that not only must some animals be implausibly dumb, but others must be remarkably devious. The masculine flycatcher cannot be that stupid, because later in the year they tend to fend the feminine ones off.

"A simpler explanation is that territorial males who have not yet attracted a female are horny and invite romance with feminine males. Once the territorial ['masculine'] males have attracted a female, they are no longer horny and no longer interested in courting a feminine male... These birds may be neighbors building a cooperative relationship based on same-sex attraction." (p. 94-95)

Moreover, it is better for a masculine male to have a feminine "gynomorphic" male as a neighbor, than a much more aggressive masculine one.

Summing up

Many biologists have done their best to ignore this strange phenomenon. But there are just too many of these cases. They require an explanation. The sexual selection theorists therefore argue that the large aggressive territory-holding male gender is "the reference male", i.e. the real thing. The other types are at best considered "alternative mating strategies" and often described as "sexual parasites". They are cheaters.

But where the traditionalists sees conflict and deceit, Roughgarden sees a practical division of labor. Roughgarden says:

"According to social selection, economic theory for the elemental one-male-one-female economic team is extended to larger teams with more 'social niches'." (2009. p. 243.)

In general feminine imagery seems to be adapted by males to reduce hostility and promote friendship (p. 99).

Roughgarden argues that the different genders represent different sectors within a kind of community economy. While some of the genders compete, others are like service providers working under contract. In return for a peaceful behavior and care for the young, they get the opportunity to mate. (p. 105)

Roughgarden argues that markings and colors on animals represents their "body English". This is how animals tell one another what their social role is, what their intentions are, and what activities they promise to perform:

"Feminine males are participating in a conversation on topics and with words used more frequently by females than by masculine males [and visa versa for the masculine females]." (2009, p. 244)

This is why they look more like females.

Now I guess you are all waiting for the punch line: trangender people are like the transgender animals. That is not given. It is definitely hard to argue that most male to female crossdreamers are feminine looking men! My main point with these posts is first and foremost to help us all think outside the box, and to demonstrate how deeply mainstream biology is anchored in traditional gender roles. Still, I will discuss the possibility of trans people being a separate gender in the final post in this series.

Up next: Gay animals!

Litterature:

Roughgarden CV

Roughgarden, Joan: The Genial Gene, Berkeley 2009. Click here for Google Books excerpt.

Roughgarden, Joan: Evolution's Rainbow, Berkeley 2004. Click here for Google Books excerpt.

Homosexuality in animals (Wikipedia)

Susan McCarthy: The fabulous kingdom of gay animals

Nudging Darwin over the rainbow SFGate on Roughgarden

Bruce Bagemihl: Biological exuberance: animal homosexuality and natural diversity

An amazing must see cartoon about queer and transgender animals

Joan Roughgarden on social evolution

Second part in a series about sex, gender and nature. In this post I look at the social selection theory of Joan Roughgarden.

Joan Roughgarden is a professor in evolutionary biology over at Stanford. I found her via a review of her new book The Genial Gene in the New Scientist.

The Genial Gene is one of the most radical attacks on Darwin I have seen in a long time. Not that she is a creationist arguing against natural selection, mind you. She does not, but she finds that the biologist's obsession with sexual selection to be questionable, and she and her research team puts up a fascinating alternative, called social selection.

Sexual selection

Sexual selection is based on the idea that individuals battle for their gene's survival in a fierce completion to get laid and get as many descendants as possible.

If you watch nature programs on Discovery or National Geographic you hear the same story over and over again: The tail of the peacock is large and colorful so that the male can attract females and have sex with them.

This narrative also confirms the stereotypes of human gender roles. According to Darwin males are passionate and females are coy. Still, the females have one important sphere of power: They select which male to have sex with, which is why males compete so hard between them. The fast and furious gets the girl.

This is relevant for transpeople, because these theories strengthen the social stereotypes of what it is to male or female. Any deviation from these stereotypes are therefore easily defined as something unnatural (in the true meaning of the word) and therefore something negative.

Sex and roles

Roughgarden does not deny that there males and females have different roles in the animal kingdom. But she does two things that are important for our understanding of the natural basis for sex differences:

1. She reinterprets the behavior of males and females according to a new overarching understanding of evolution. By doing that she kills some of the stereotypes.
   
   
2. She adds variety to the behavior of both males and females. There is no ideal macho male or sexy chick out there. In some species there are even different types of males and females, types that look and behave differently from others of the same sex.

Choosing a mate

The social selection theory of Roughgarden and her friends downplay the role of aggression and completion and focus instead on collaboration. She argues convincingly that there is no way the peacock hen can determine which male has the best genes based on the look of his tail. Indeed, research shows that the female disregard male plumage (Roughgarden 2009, p. 37).

Instead Roughgarden believes the female chooses to mate with the one she reckons will be the best to help her raise her offspring. Actually how the hen determines the parental capabilities of the male is a bit unclear to me, but in this respect her theory is at least as plausible as the old one.

Moreover, her theory (as opposed to the sexual selection theory) does not rest on the female's capability of finding the best man. You see, there is no hierarchy of genetic quality:

"All males are equivalent in genetic quality, except a rare fraction that obviously contain deleterious mutations and are present in a mutation-selection balance" (2009, p. 240).

I can remember how I as a young man reading about evolution, found it so hard to make sexual selection fit with what I saw around me. Clearly, it was not just the Queen of the Prom or the sexy soccer player that got kids? Most of my class mates got offspring, regardless of their looks or the brand of their car.

And if only the "fittest" of animals get offspring, why don't they all look the same? Why is there so much variation between individuals?

Reading Roughgarden makes it all make more sense, even if I think she downplays the role of aggression and violence a bit too much.

Compassionate Darwinism

Roughgarden says:

"According to social selection, what each sex does is subject to negotiation in local circumstances and statistical regularities in sex roles reflect commonness of circumstance.... Natural selection arises from differences in the number of offspring successfully reared, and particular behaviors are viewed as contributing to producing offspring and to building and maintaining a social infrastructure within which offspring are reared (Roughgarden 2009, p. 239)."

It is not the one who gets laid most often that win the race, but the one that manages to help his or her offspring survive through childhood. The best way of ensuring that is through collaboration and the division of labor, and that requires other skills than aggression and deceit.

Variation

Roughgarden again and again points to the enormous amount of variety found in nature. Collaboration can take many forms, and the behavior also changes over time. This is why closely related species like the chimpanzee, the bonobo and homo sapiens behave so differently.

There are, however, logical -- yes, even mathematical -- models that explain why such models of collaboration helps the survival of the species. I am not going into the details here, but if you have a mathematically inclined mind, take a look at The Genial Gene. In that book she demonstrates through game theory that collaboration is more effective than cheating for the survival of your own genetic lineage.

Sex and collaboration

According to the sexual selection narrative, male and females are in conflict and cooperation is at best a secondary development.

In Roughgarden's world things are different:

"According to social selection, male and female mates begin with a cooperative relationship because they have committed themselves to a common 'bank account' of evolutionary success. Their offspring represent indivisible earnings from a common investment. As such, conflict develops only secondarily if a division of labor cannot be successfully negotiated."

Roughgarden takes this propensity towards collaboration so far that she argues that males are not promiscuous by default. Male promiscuity is a strategy of last resort that occurs when males are excluded from control of offspring rearing. (I am not so sure about this one, especially when it comes to the males of homo sapiens, but I am willing to go give her -- and men -- the benefit of doubt.)

Sexual selection theory on the other hand describes monogamy as an entrapment of males by females. Males do not want all the hassle of rearing kids, but they accept it anyway in order to get laid.

Roughgarden takes the logic of collaboration down to the level of sperm and eggs.

In biology the difference between male and female is determined on the basis of the size of the gametes (sex cells). Following the logic of sexual selection the sperm seem to be cheating on the egg by forcing "her" to do all the hard work. In social selection the difference in sizes is a practical way of ensuring a successful conception. The big egg is easier to find for the sperm. Moreover, it contains the provisions needed for the first period of growth.

Power cliques

So what about the peacock's tail?

Well, Roughgarden does not think male ornaments (feathers, antlers etc.) are there for the female to judge the genetic quality of the male. She believes male and female ornaments serve as "admission tickets" to "power-holding cliques" that control the opportunity for successful rearing of offspring.

Again, this makes sense to me. A man doesn't buy an expensive car just to impress the girls. He buys it to impress his mates. He signals that he is successful and that he is one to be invited to the parties of the in-crowd.

Again and again I have been told that women dress up etc. to attract males, but the fact is that most men (apart from cross-dressers, that is :-) are unable to distinguish one brand of make-up, clothing or perfume from another. They will find a decently dressed woman attractive without knowing the secret language of women. The reason women put so much effort into shopping and brands, is first of all that they want to fit in with their fellow sisters, i.e. "the power cliques" of Roughgarden.

All right, but if this is the case, why doesn't the peacock hen have colorful plumage? The hens should, like human women, also strive to join cliques, right?

This is where Roughgarden gets a little vague. She has no general explanation of why male animals, as Darwin argued, seems to have more ornaments in general. In the case of the peacock, however, the explanation is simple: The female protects the eggs, so she has developed camouflage colors. I guess all the blue hens were killed off before their eggs hatched.

Another obvious argument would be that our tendency of interpreting blue feathers as more sexy than brown feathers, or big antlers as more impressive than no antlers, is biased. The male peacock clearly find the brown hen amazingly attractive.

Why is woman more ornamental?

As you probably have understood by now, I find this immensely fascinating, and again I am reminded of discussions I had when I was younger.

I guess it was the crossdreamer in me that had to ask the obvious question: If the male is the one with the colorful feathers, why is it that it is the human males who are grey and bland and the human females who are beautiful, colorful and have the more prominent curvy "ornaments"?

I admit I am a bit gynephiliacly biased here, but my impression is strengthened by the fact that in most cultures women also wear more ornamental and colorful clothes.

Believe it or not, but evolutionary biologists have taken the lack of male plumage seriously. Some of them argue that the human male ornament (the one used to impress the girls) is not their body but their brain. Men have developed huge brains to outsmart other men and thereby win their way into a girls heart. (No, I am not making this up!)

This immediately leads to the question: Why have females developed equally smart brains? Well, to appreciate the genetic quality of the male brain, of course!

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller puts it this way:

"If hominid females happened to develop a sexual preference for creative intelligence, then males with more creative intelligence would attract more sexual partners and would produce more offspring. Those offspring would inherit both the taste for clever courtship and the capacity for producing it. Over many generations, average creative intelligence in the lineage would increase rapidly, perhaps explaining why brain size tripled in just two million years."

Note that Miller doesn't make the obvious conclusion: that the females' have gotten bigger brains in order to attract males. Males are clearly not able to appreciate female intelligence! We go for tits and asses, and not for the woman's ability to help us raise our kids. So much for the big brain!

Seriously, I don't know where to begin...

Why am I telling you all this? Because we have to read all of this "authoritative" science for what it is: stories told by men and women like you an me: people who have their own hang-ups and prejudices.

Sexual differences

Let's get back on track:

Sexual selection theory find it hard to explain why some species have no or only small visible differences between the sexes (cp. penguins, sparrows or wolves). They normally explain this by saying that this happens when females lack a sense of aesthetics (!). This very argument does, of course, weaken the whole sexual selection theory.

For Roughgarden "sexual monomorphism" signals the absence of same-sex power cliques: "This should occur in ecological situations where the economically efficient coalition is the coalition of the whole," she says (p. 243).

Sex-role reversal

In some species we see sex-role reversal: The male provide more parental investment than the female.

This should not happen according to the sexual selection narrative. This narrative says that males should do less parenting, because the sperm is smaller than the egg (long story!). According to Roughgarden, this kind of natural feminism makes perfect sense. It is just another type of useful contract based on negotiations in that particular ecological niche.

Transgender animals

It is when Joan Roughgarden goes on to describe "gender multiplicity" it gets really interesting for a transgendered person. That's the topic of my next post.

Postscript on Joan Roughgarden

As I noted earlier, most scientist do not rock the boat. They do not challenge the ruling paradigm for a lot of reasons, the main one being probably that it was the dominant mentality or belief system of a discipline that attracted them to it in the first place.

That leads to the question of why Roughgarden has made such a radical stance.

I didn't read her own history until after having read The Genial Gene. Then it all became clear. Roughgarden is an M2F transsexual.

So far I haven't seen any serious attempts at debunking her theory on the basis of her personal history. It seems her position in the academic world is too strong for that to happen.

[Photo of Roughgarden: Nature]

She did not have to leave Stanford after her transition, partly because of strong support from Condoleezza Rice, the university provost. Yes, we are talking about the Condy Rice! Some times real life is much stranger than fiction.

Anyway, we must be as critical towards her science as we are towards the traditionalists. She openly admit that she has an agenda: to develop a theory with room for outsiders like gays and transsexuals. That might lead her to ignore findings that go against her theory of collaboration.

See also:
Roughgarden on transgender animals

Litterature

Roughgarden CV

Roughgarden, Joan: The Genial Gene, Berkely 2009. Click here for Google Books excerpt.

Roughgarden, Joan: Evolution's Rainbow, Berkely 2004. Click here for Google Books excerpt.

Nudging Darwin over the rainbow SFGate on Roughgarden

"Joan Roughgarden profile: A plea for diversity" Nature 2003