It's unnatural, right

I was having a beer with some mates when the outrageous policies of a newly-reminted president were unfortunately raised.

“Well, there’s one thing he has got right”, one bloke claimed, “From now on you’re either a dude or a female. It’s unnatural, right”.

Each of those three words, “It’s”, “Unnatural” and “Right” flicked my switch. Let me explain.

My mate didn’t leave his claim of “unnaturalness” open to affirmation or dispute with “Am I right?”. “Right!” was a statement that if not challenged effectively confirmed that I agreed, although I didn’t know what my silence would have endorsed. Was ‘it’ the notion that everyone was absolutely and unambiguously male or female or that their persona must match their birth gender? Maybe, hopefully, my mate was suggesting that he finds  unfamiliar pronouns challenging. Any one of these “It’s” may have been implied but the others were unreasonably conflated.

“It” and “right” forced my hand to respond but as an ecologist I reckoned I could hold my own with the “Unnatural” assertion.

We obscure sex education for our children by referring to “the birds and bees”, implying that all animals display consistent gender and reproductive strategies. Ironically bees are a classic example of gender diversity. The bees who visit flowers, collect honey and sting us when we chase a ball across a clover lawn are infertile ‘workers’ because they were not fed the fertility-enabling royal jelly before puberty. This infertility can’t be reversed, and some biologists argue that workers represent a third non-breeding gender within the hive. By not devoting energy to reproduction, these asexual bees make far more effective workers, as the global evolutionary success of colonial insects attests.

Slugs are hermaphroditic, with each animal being both male and female from birth. Turtle eggs incubated at higher temperatures become female, but the same egg incubated in cooler sand would turn out male. The biggest and toughest male clown fish in an anemone transforms to a female upon the death of the matriarch. My mate has no trouble understanding that male barramundi ‘become’ female at a certain size. What box would they tick before, during or after this transformation?

Only after catching many hundred tiny Grey’s skinks did I realise they hid a story of gender irrelevance. One day, several hundred kilometres south of my usual haunts, I caught a four fingered, five toed skink with a bright yellow belly. Having never seen one with a yellow belly, I raced it into the museum where the curator nonchalantly informed me that I had a typical male skink. Instantly I realised that the population I was familiar with were all females. Like the Bynoes’ gecko commonly found under iron sheets at ruins, and several stick insects and grasshoppers, some populations of Grey’s skinks are parthenogenetic, the females initiated viable egg formation without the need for a male.
Some populations of bearded dragons take gender ambiguity even further. Gender in these large dragons can be determined by either or both genetic or environmental cues. Some pronoun-defying dragons have the large size, big beards and cavalier attitude, or phenotype, of males but are biologically female. These ‘Lola’s’ lay more, larger eggs than typical females.

There are many more bizarre, sometimes beneficial and always absolutely natural, variations on the two-gender, ‘birds and bees’ illusion. But by seeking to clarify “Unnatural”, the prejudice of my mate was clarified by his wife who chipped in. “If we let anyone choose their sex it will be the end of humans. We need dudes and shielas to reproduce and survive.”

Really?

Back to the birds and bees analogy, there are many birds, like the babblers and fairy wrens I could hear not 20 metres from the esky, that benefit from cooperative breeding, where non-reproducing ‘aunties’ assist the alpha pair in the flock to raise their chicks. Ants will outlast humans, despite, no because, most individuals forgo the opportunity to breed so they can altruistically assist their colonies. Suggesting that non-breeding animals are a threat to their society is ignorant. Extrapolating this misplaced fear to people, who choose to recognise as other than conventional ‘breeders’, is as insensitive as it is false. No meat and three veg ‘typical’ dude or shiela has anything to worry about a courageous minority who are also, at long last, calling a spade a spade.

I relayed my recent experience with Ebony, a family friend I’d known since birth. Ebony was as confident and happy as I’d recalled for years, and brought along to our annual catchup a couple of intelligent, funny and kind mates who had found their community and were kicking goals. Sure they had preferred pronouns, but they never castigated me when I stuffed up. They were relieved and empowered to be recognised for who they were, not who someone else thought they should be.

My mates conceded that no one they loved had been hurt by woke acceptance of gender or sexual diversity.  Indeed as Ebony demonstrated, the opposite was true.