do you think animals can be trans? I saw someone posting in the vegan tag claiming that (but it looks like they deactivated). They basically said humans are animals and being trans is natural, so trans and cis animals probably exist. My first instinct is to say bullshit but the more i think about it,,, idk. Gay animals exist. Why shouldn't someone animals be trans?
Generally my answer is “animals can’t be trans because that relies on a cultural construct of gender”, but I think animals can get fairly close. Close enough to show sex is not binary and does not equal gender.
First, animals which literally do transition between sexes. Fish do this, but that’s boring. Did you know some ducks can do this? Mandarin ducks have one ovary and one pre-developed gonad, and if the ovary is damaged or stops producing estrogen, they become fertile male ducks (x).
Secondly, animals which are intersex. Intersex lions are typically female lions who grow manes, get big, try and mate with females, roar and scent-mark like males, and also stay with the pack and mate with males. (x)
Lastly, animals which we could probably call trans, because behaviourally they don’t match their sex in a cultural sense.
There’s a fairly long and hard-to-interpret study I found on rhesus monkeys treated with androgens or androgen blockers pre-natally. They found the behaviour differentiation is partially due to prenatal hormones and partially due to maternal behaviour (mama monkeys are more attentive to female babies). So you can totally have a monkey which is “culturally” treated one way, but have behavioural features which are different (the study identified some ‘masculinized’ play for baby monkeys, like rough play and mounting other monkeys). (x)
This is the closest we get to having a cultural idea of gender being in conflict with the ‘birth sex’ of the animal. However, it is prompted by manipulating maternal hormones, not spotted in nature. I think it’s probably more of a matter of it being difficult to observe and not a high priority for conservationists (which is fair), but that doesn’t change the lack of examples of this in the wild.
