Every Body Is A Sex Spectrum

Watch a cassowary and it feels as if you’ve slipped backwards through time. 

The crested, flightless, shaggy-feathered birds look as if they have stepped right out of the Cretaceous. The fact that they are known for slashing bothersome humans with their sharp toe claws, Velociraptor style, certainly underscores the fact that dinosaurs never really left and still strut among us as birds.

It’s so easy to get caught up in how primordial the colorful birds seem that it’s easy to miss an aspect of their biology that directly contradicts the notion that biological sex is binary.

Egg-laying cassowaries – what we usually deem females among birds – have phalluses.

The organs are modified clitorises that look like smaller versions of the phalluses possessed by sperm-producing cassowaries typically labeled as males. 

But hold on a moment. The phallus of a sperm-producing cassowary isn’t like what zoologists have documented among us mammals. The organ isn’t directly connected to internal organs to ferry sperm from inside to outside. It’s more of a chute that connects to the birds’ single-service orifice for urination, defecation, egg-laying, and mating, or cloaca. The bird’s semen moves via the cloaca through the tube to an end that, as zoologist Bruce Bagemihl described it in Biological Exuberance (pg. 237), looks like the inverted, pushed-in finger of a rubber glove.  

Without a doubt, cassowary reproductive anatomy strains linguistic and scientific convention.

Some cassowaries lay eggs, others produce sperm, but categorizing the birds as male and female in a strict binary completely misses their similarities and the way the birds undermine recent, western ideas of what sex is.

Alone, cassowaries might seem like outliers compared to what’s often assumed to be a near universal sexual binary. The opposite is true. 

Nature is replete with examples of living things that break apart the notion that nature is divided strictly into two sexes and that genitals, gametes, chromosomes, or any single feature can be used to determine an organism’s sex.

Consider Trichaptum, a gill-like fungus that you might find fanning out from the side of a tree.

In order to reproduce, the reproductive cells of these fungi have to come into contact with a genetically-different mating type from their own. It’s a process that relies on difference, resulting in as many as 17,550 possible sexes as determined by genetics.

Studies of another fungus, Schizophyllum, found more than 23,000 mating types, an incredible amount of sexual diversity in organisms that might look all the same to us.       

The sex of American alligator hatchlings is not determined when eggs are fertilized but is influenced by temperature, likely part of why crocodylian species have been able to hang on through environmental shifts. 

When flowers have both male and female parts, botanists call them “perfect.” The buttercups you see growing alongside a trail are such flowers, capable of self-fertilization in addition to relying on pollinators. 

And, of course, many fish change sex in response to social changes. Among clownfish, a breeding male clownfish changes to female if the breeding female is lost, which is how Finding Nemo should have played out if Disney wasn’t so cowardly about queer stories in its media empire.

Birds or begonias, fish or fungi, look at life closely and it’s immediately clear that sex is not a binary but instead a constellation.

And yet, for most of my life, such natural wonders have been presented as strange outliers. 

Changing sexes or having genitals that did not match human expectations made the organisms bizarre, points of puerile interest.

I’ll never forget chatting with a group of science writers when an editor at a magazine I wrote for approached talking about an embargoed study about lizards that can change sex, nudging someone in the huddle to pitch him about “the tranny lizards.” 

Scientists and the science-minded often treated organisms that broke conventions and heavily-gendered views of nature as freaks, the implication being that sex is binary, fixed, and deterministic. It felt as if a sexual binary was defended as a good and right order to nature which only a few organisms broke. It’s an utterly ridiculous view of life, because humans change sex, too. 

I know because I did it.

When the subject of human sexes comes up, Agustín Fuentes notes in his book Sex is a Spectrum, the idea of a distinct split between male and female is only possible because of a collection of underlying assumptions and colonialist history. 

The gender “man” is wrongly considered synonymous with male, itself built on the supposition that the distinction includes male gametes, male gonads, and male genes. But these three categories don’t always line up together – sometimes with people going their whole lives without knowing, in the case of genetics – and neither do they require that sex stay fixed for an individual’s entire life. 

After all, even people who might have all three of these G’s consistent with a particular sex go through changes related to sex like menopause or breast growth as estrogen levels among cisgender men shift – so common about thirty percent of cisgender men experience it. 

The idea that there are only two sex categories, and these remain fixed for life, arose from a combination of western religious dogma and oversimplified medical science that’s only about 200 years old, a view of life that has less to do with nature and more to do with oppressing Indigenous and non-white cultures that developed their own, more fluid ideas of sex and gender.

While the cassowary might seem like a bizarre anomaly to us, the bird is celebrated among several Indigenous cultures in southeast Asia for mixing or moving across gender categories.

It’s taken a great deal of misunderstanding and dogmatic forcing of colonialist ideas upon nature to come up with the idea that sex is fixed and binary.

I was not raised with a broader view of what sex is or how it can change. Being an American, I grew up in a culture that sent the boys to the cafeteria and the girls to the gym for a special health class on sex, that has fussed over who is allowed in what bathroom for years, and has begun asserting, contrary to all evidence, that only men and women exist, at least in the eyes of the law. 

I had to peel off a number of layers of gender performance before I could embrace the fact that I was not the boy nor the man that those around me kept insisting I had to be. 

When I finally did so at 36, anxiously threading my way through the medical system to access care, I started a hormone replacement therapy regimen that quickly scrubbed what little testosterone my body made and boosted the estrogen that I otherwise couldn’t make for myself.

The most miraculous thing happened. My body, already familiar with those hormones in different concentrations, knew exactly what to do with those hormones. I started packing on fat around my butt and hips and breasts, I no longer felt numb and like my head was always playing static, and, most importantly, I simply felt better. 

My body hadn’t been wrong. I was simply not receiving something essential I needed, something my body knew to crave, and could finally flourish when the imbalance was corrected.

For those of us who decide to medically transition, the changes we undergo are often cast as cosmetic. Or, most maliciously, as deceitful. The sense that we must be getting away with something even filters into biology, such as fish species where some males look like females and are therefore dubbed “sneaker” males that trick females into mating with them instead of the bigger, masculinized males. 

But for the past six years I’ve seen and felt how my body was already familiar with what estrogen and testosterone do, regardless of my sex assigned at birth, sharing far more in common with every other person on this planet than not. Hormone replacement therapy works, whatever gender we feel we are and whatever sex we know we’re closer to, because all human bodies are responsive to such shifts. 

The sex we are is not something pre-established. Sex is a matter of becoming, broadly variable and always changing. 

All those natural outliers held up as unusual cases requiring special explanation are not confounding evolutionary puzzles at all. The cassowaries, hyenas, clownfish, and more underscore that the real problem has been a recent and narrow view of what sex is, not with those species – or ourselves.

We cannot take in this flexible, wonderfully-confounding view of sex and not be changed by it.

The recognition of variable, transmutable sex requires that we dismantle a great number of expectations that we’ve held onto out of simplicity, like how testosterone promotes aggression and is a male hormone that is important to cultural values some men hold dear, creating a false image of oppositional sexism where men are strong and women are weaker, a teetering house of logical cards that is nevertheless rolled out through repeated hearings, legislative sessions, and talking head opinion pieces about who should be allowed on what sports team or what public services women are allowed to access. 

My hope, as transgender and transsexual, is not merely for acceptance or a third segregated space. A heavily-gendered, binary view of the world makes us live in a society that feels like endless conversion therapy. We are constantly pushed and punished according to gendered expectations that were entirely fabricated and focus on division over commonality. 

Nature doesn’t dictate our actions.

Transgender people deserve a kinder world no matter the science. But I still take heart in what we’ve learned about wrasse that change gonads and gametes, fungi that spin off new sexes for their survival, and cassowaries that defy binary conventions.

We, too, are living things with an incredible evolutionary backstory all the way back to the last common ancestor of every organism alive today. Organisms that embody just how malleable, changeable, and fluid sex is.

Understanding them means changing our understanding of ourselves, and nature is practically begging us to internalize the fact that sex, in one body or in a species, will always be more transmutable than fixed. 

I want to thrive, yes, but I also want everyone else to know that humans are a multi-sexed species that express themselves in more genders than can be counted, that how we become is more important than hospital paperwork stamped the day we’re born.

Our bodies are born to be free of such restrictions.

I hope we can all embrace ourselves, for today and how we wish to be tomorrow.