If you have access to CBC on your television, you might have been able to watch a new episode of The Nature of Things that talked through many examples of animals and plants whose sex and/or gender expression change during their time on earth. As someone who is genderqueer it wasn’t hard being sucked inside its very welcoming vortex and learning many a cool lesson.
Among them:
- female hyenas have pseudo penises they can use to urinate and to engage in intercourse, making them deserve recognition as intersex
- if put in charge of a pride, female lions can masculinize their behaviour and/or appearance
- ruffs, a kind of Norwegian sandpiper, have many males that look completely identical to females
- spruce trees’ cones are generally female if higher and male if lower on it
- jack-in-the-pulpit doesn’t have a specific sex when it starts living; as time goes on it will change to male then female as it lives longer
Despite anything anyone might be tempted to think, being beyond a boring two-box binary is pretty par for the course established by Mother Nature and so deserves recognition as completely natural, surreal as some examples might seem.
– Amy Soule