When California Governor Gavin Newsom recently proclaimed that Democrats should be more “culturally normal” as part of his ongoing attempt to position himself for the presidency by throwing trans people under the bus, I thought about whales. A few months earlier, Facebook’s algorithm had delivered a bioGraphic essay republished by Nautilus about a newly discovered intersex southern right whale to my feed. While intersex whales are nothing new, this was the first documented example from this particular species, and the author took the occasion to reflect on the creativity and fluidity of nature. “When scientists identify the next intersex animal,” the essay concludes, “that individual, whether a guppy or a whale, will offer another challenge to rigid definitions of sex. What society deems normal is a box carefully drawn around a wild and messy world, and each individual who can’t be contained offers a fascinating glimpse at nature’s true diversity.”

The article came my way via the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the American Cetacean Society, whose posts usually garner reactions and comments in the single or double digits. This intersex-whale post, however, had reams of comments and more than 17,000 reactions. Against my better judgment—as a trans woman, and as a person with other things to do—I read some of the comments. While some maligned the “woke whale” as an “abomination” or “a freak of nature,” others insisted that the story was “fake news” and bemoaned the idea that “liberal idiots made up a transgender whale.”

The Facebook turmoil over an intersex whale was, of course, about something even larger than whales. The post came at a time when efforts to enforce rigid definitions of sex and gender are front and center in public affairs. Evidence of gender and sexual variation in the natural world, such as this intersex whale, can help unsettle the myth that a rigid human gender binary is part of “the natural order” of life on what is indeed a wild and messy planet, as the author of the bioGraphic essay notes.

On the one hand, we don’t need to turn to whales or guppies or any other nonhuman organism to challenge rigid definitions of human sex and gender, since our own species defies such narrow categorizations in its own right. There are many intersex humans, after all, and as a hapless Trump lawyer recently learned in court, the existence of intersexuality dismantles the notion that sex and gender are binary.

Transgender and nonbinary people, in addition to intersex people, likewise dispel the notion of the gender binary as a matter of, as the Trump administration asserts, “biological truth.”

The mere existence of trans and gender-nonconforming people now and throughout human history, in every culture and corner of the globe, is evidence of this. And anyone interested in actual “biological truth” might want to explore the decades of neuroscientific and endocrinological research on gender diversity, from studies showing that many trans people are born with brains that develop to resemble the brains of their experienced gender, to genetic research showing that trans people often have variations in the genes that process the sex hormones androgen and estrogen. This occurs along a spectrum, not in a binary.

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This is not to say that all trans experiences can be reduced to these neuroanatomical and genetic measures, or that scientists should give people trans tests with their brain-measuring machines. And trans people certainly should not be required to cite medical studies to prove that we exist as we do. But at a time when biology is being weaponized, it is important to recognize that human biology doesn’t adhere to a cis binary framework. Sexual and gender diversity is undeniably a thing that our species does, in any cultural environment.

And we are certainly not alone in this. Nature is profoundly queer and restlessly inventive, trying out as many possibilities as form will allow. Ninety-four percent of flower plants are monoecious or hermaphroditic, meaning that individual plants possess both female and male reproductive organs. Among the remaining 6 percent, some individual plants that are either male or female can change their sex. Many species of willow trees, for example, exhibit this sex lability and can change from female to male, or to both, and back again.

Excluding insects, 33 percent of all animal species are predominately hermaphroditic. Some of these animals start out as one sex and change to another. Clownfish are an iconic example: They begin their lives as male and have the ability to transform their bodies to become female when the alpha female of their social group leaves or dies. Other fish, such as wrasses, exhibit this same sequential hermaphrodism, but in the other direction. Many invertebrates—such as worms and snails—possess the reproductive structures of both sexes at the same time. Some species have more than two sexes; splitgill mushrooms have over 23,000 different sexes, or mating types.

There’s a lingering misperception of the natural world as a place of uniform cisnormative gender orders and strict heterosexuality, with animals lined up as if on the decks of Noah’s Ark in neat, straight, binary pairs, two by two. But as the ecological-justice organizer Deseree Fontenot explains, “We’re on a planet full of immensely diverse forms of embodiment, sex and gender variations, kinship, care systems, and strategies for living and reproducing. They are expansive and complex and don’t fit into neat categories, and that holds many lessons for our species about adapting, surviving, and cooperating.”

Our species has the ability to learn these lessons and respect this breathtaking diversity within which we are enmeshed. However, as the authoritarian repression of gender diversity intensifies, its erasure campaign has targeted other species. A reading series of the children’s book Wishtree was canceled at a Virginia school district after complaints from adults who took issue with the book’s oak tree character, who describes being monoecious: “Some trees are male. Some trees are female. And some like me, are both… Call me he, call me she, anything will work.” This scientifically grounded statement was enough to shut down the reading series. 

Similarly, Erica S. Perl, author of the book Whale, Quail, Snail, abruptly had her visit to a Virginia elementary school canceled after some adults complained about a snail character who did not fit the male/female binary. (Snails are hermaphroditic.) The illustrated book Worm Loves Worm has been banned in several states for parallel reasons. Worm Loves Worm is a book about two worms getting married, in which both worms, understandably, want to be both the bride and the groom. (Worms are also hermaphroditic.)

President Trump kicked off his second term with his own animal-themed genderfluidity fiction, falsely claiming that his administration was stopping Biden-era research supposedly aimed at “making mice transgender.” Back in the realm of reality, these studies used transgenic–not transgender–mice to study the effects of hormones on things like HIV vaccines, fertility, asthma, and breast cancer. Congresswoman Nancy Mace also sounded the trans-mice false alarm and claimed Biden spent $10 million “creating transgender animals.” 

The right is so invested in policing human genders that they are policing the full expanse of the web of life, no matter how far their distortions disconnect us from that web, and from ourselves.

Etymologically, the prefix trans- means “beyond, across, so as to change.” With this in mind, we should think seriously about why some people have such a hard time accepting an intersex whale, or a monoecious oak tree, or a transgender human, when you consider just how very trans—using this broader sense of the word—life is. Whales walked on land before they evolved over millions of years into the aquatic giants we know today. And before that, the ancestors of land-dwelling whales lived in the water. Transformation and fluidity—in gender and in general—are foundational principles of life on this planet, core to the nature of nature. You could say that whales’ “nature” is to swim, but you could also say their nature is to change. And not only do species evolve, but they coevolve, mixing and blending along with one another. Plants evolved their attractive flowers and scents to connect with winged pollinators; we humans can also appreciate the multisensory lure of flowers, even if we are not involved in pollination, because we share enough of the imagination of a bee and the aesthetic sensibilities of a butterfly to be drawn in by a flower’s beauty.

In their book Ways of Being, James Bridle marvels at these types of interspecies entanglements. According to Bridle, our interconnections also reveal the insubstantiality of the imagined boundaries between us. Attempts to tightly box in gender are biologically nonsensical. The closer we look at anything, the more interconnection we find spilling out in all directions. “It’s beautiful, this teeming world of ancestors and progeny, this utterly animated free-for-all, this breaking down of boundaries,” Bridle writes. I agree: It is beautiful—the multiplicity, mutuality, fluidity, and complexity of life’s interconnection. And it’s not just pretty to look at; these principles are sources of our power, of life’s creative ability to adapt, survive, and flourish. And they are particularly important to draw on right now amid rising fascism. Authoritarian movements emerge from a mindset governed by precisely the opposite of these principles: homogeneity, dominance, division, rigidity, fixity, reduction, and fear of change. Often, those who exclude and demonize trans people while working to impose a rigid binary order will invoke divine authority. For example, during the last presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared, “God created two genders: male and female,” and his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that US citizens would be forced to get a passport that designated their “God-given” gender.

Similarly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who describes transness as “satanic,” proclaimed, “There are only two genders. And we are made in God’s image.” The former Congress member has also said, “I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman. We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We are the weaker sex, but we are our husband’s wife.” Project 2025, the Christian-nationalist blueprint that formed the ideological foundations for Trump’s anti-transgender actions, aims to sculpt American society around a heterosexual “Bible-based” family model, with a cisgender male patriarch at the helm, women in a position of subordination, and LGBTQ+ people abjected and erased.

This regressive, anti-gender social-control politics is a playbook in global circulation. Modern authoritarian leaders—from Vladimir Putin to Viktor Orbán to Donald Trump—try to consolidate power by imposing a patriarchal binary order that they claim is derived from “nature” and designed by a male Christian god.

Not only is this binary not actually in alignment with any natural order, but rather a hierarchically structured oppositional dualism designed to shore up power for cisgender men at the expense of women and others. The subtext of the statement “There are only two genders” is that one of those genders is ordained to rule over the other. As the philosopher Kevin Richardson writes, “Gender, in reality, is expansive…. Maintaining the binary requires constant work: medical classification, legal enforcement, cultural policing, and moral pressure. When people invoke Nature or God to justify this work, it’s worth asking whose interests are being served.”

The assault on gender diversity in contemporary authoritarian movements emerges from the legacies of colonial oppression. Prior to European colonization, many of the world’s Indigenous cultures had polygender systems—some with three, four, even five recognized genders—with specific terminology and traditions to honor variations. Before European colonization, in many parts of Africa, the Americas, and Asia, it was not uncommon for gender-diverse people to assume leadership roles, particularly as spiritual leaders and healers, owing to an assumed adeptness with liminality and a balancing of energies that can accompany gender variance. 

But Christian missionaries and European colonial authorities attempted to systematically eradicate fluid Indigenous gender systems and install a racialized patriarchal binary in its place. They did this by specifically targeting gender-diverse people: publicly mutilating and executing them; sending them into exile; kidnapping Indigenous children and sending them to boarding schools where gender-diverse students were punished and forced to conform to European binary norms; and enacting a system of laws that penalized expressions of gender outside the European binary. 

If this colonial/authoritarian gender binary were so “natural,” one might reasonably wonder why it requires genocide and fascism to try and force it into place.

The “constant work” of transphobia—book bans, bathroom surveillance, obsessions with other people’s bodies and private health decisions—also requires telling a flattened, dessicated story about life on earth that obscures how dynamic it really is. Combating the ugliness of division and domination requires an expansive vision capable of seeing and honoring the beauty of the earth’s transness—that is, of its creativity, diversity, fluidity, and interconnectedness.

For my part, I began my gender transition in July 2023, in the midst of the ongoing assault on trans people. As I’ve written elsewhere, while embarking on my transition at this time has felt like walking into a house that is on fire, it has also felt like coming home. 

“Eco,” from “ecology,” comes from the Greek word meaning “home,” and ecology also connotes the connections between us. When I say that transitioning has felt like coming home, I mean it in this ecological sense. The process of transitioning has involved cultivating a radical hospitality for my whole self, and not only has this made me infinitely more at home in my own body, it has also made me feel closer to others, both human and more-than-human.

My transness is intrinsic to me, and it also originates in the broader ecological systems beyond me. It is one of the many things that connect me, despite our obvious differences, to an intersex whale. In this sense, I see gender diversity as an energetic and material force—rooted in the living planet—that envelops humans and includes us in unique ways. 

Perhaps above all else, I now see my trans identity as a loving gift from the earth. 

In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “To name the earth as a gift is to feel your place in the web of reciprocity.” To name the earth as a gift—and to really feel your place in the web—at a time in which the earth is under such disorienting and devastating attacks, can be emotionally grueling. And it comes with an ethical obligation: to receive the gift with gratitude and to care for the earth the way one would care for a cherished gift. 

For the past several months, my 8-year-old child—who is the biggest fan of animals I know—and I have been going on weekly “nature adventure walks” together. On these walks, we explore the lakefront and the parks near where we live, and try to learn as much as we can about a new lifeform each time: sphinx moths, milkweed beetles, serviceberries, red-winged blackbirds. The point is less to memorize plant and animal facts, and more to let ourselves feel awed by the fascinating things that living things do, to allow ourselves to pay attention, to laugh, to wonder. The point, at heart, is to be amazed, and in that process of amazement, to learn in our bodies, beneath our words, the truth that we and all these other lifeforms belong here.