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.

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. 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.”