Trans Darwin; or, Supernormal Biology
There's nothing as trans as sex, just ask a seagull.
Do you even have biological sex, bro?
So asked the pigeon to Charles Darwin in 1862, I’d like to think.
There is no shortage of armchair sophists who leap at the chance to brag about how much biological sex they apparently have. “It’s 6th grade biology!” “There are only two sexes!” “You can’t deny nature!”
Congratulations, I hope you’re very happy, although I suspect your deep insecurity expresses that you are not. And in reality, your sex betrays your defensive politics. Your sex doesn’t “match” your gender, there’s no such thing as cisgender in nature. And there’s nothing as trans as sex. It’s just, like, supernormal biology.
Let me explain.
The Origin of Sex
There’s good reason to go back to Darwin for this. My brilliant friend Jean-Thomas Tremblay and I are doing just that right now, tracing the feminist and queer impulses to recuperate nature through Darwin. Why bother? Aren’t nature and biology just a bunch of essentialist and determinist stories meant to oppress us? That has certainly been true historically, as the theory of evolution presented in Darwin’s work, however complex textually, was taken up in a profoundly racist, colonial, and authoritarian mode, leading to the kind of nineteenth century hierarchy of races and twentieth century eugenics that we now associate with the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Still, feminists and, more lately, queer theorists, have been mounting an alternate hypothesis: what if nature is actually indeterminate, non-teleological, and essentially creative?
The idea that nature might animate our feminist and queer imaginaries is hardly innocent (this is precisely what JT and I are writing about). In Histories of the Transgender Child, I make a similar argument about the concept of gender’s plasticity: indeterminacy is hardly a politically progressive category if we look at its actual history. Gender’s malleability and inability to be pinned down—it’s often celebrated fluidity—was put in the service of deeply violent, racist eugenic medicine and science for most of the twentieth century, with devastating consequences for intersex and trans people.
Just because a biological form is unruly and constantly changing, doesn’t make it left wing.
But much of the jockeying around trans politics and biology today turns on very poorly articulated ideas about genetics. You’ve seen this a thousand times: chromosomes are king and trans people can’t change sex because no one is more sovereign than the king.
It’s a bad argument that profoundly misunderstands what “sex” refers to in biology (hint: sex does not reduce to chromosomes, which are only one aspect of its composition). But, riffing on Grace Lavery’s genius forthcoming book on trans feminism, it matters to be able to say that sex change is absolutely accomplishable and real. As part of that project, let’s rewind to a pre-genetic era and ask a question to Darwin, much like his prized pigeon might have: where does sex come from and what is it?
The theory of evolution by natural selection, you might recall, is only half of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The other half he calls “sexual selection.” First introduced in The Origin of Species, Darwin explains sexual selection as a concept for something he has observed in countless plant and animal species: the development of aesthetic forms—i.e., beauty—that have no obvious bearing on “the struggle for life.” Rather than a general, utilitarian struggle for life, which just doesn’t need to be pretty, Darwin surmises that there is also a “struggle” between sexes. In many animals, that means a struggle over mating; so it is that males of many species have evolved to be extremely beautiful and artful in their behavior. The more beautiful the male, the higher likelihood that he will have a chance to mate. And so, over time the beautiful males reproduce more than others and their forms are sexually selected, becoming widespread and outlandish.
Darwin uses the example of the different colors of woodpeckers to make the contrasting point in The Origin of Species:
“If green woodpeckers alone had existed, and we did not know that there were many black and pied kinds, I dare say that we should have thought that the green colour was a beautiful adaptation to conceal this tree-frequenting bird from its enemies; and consequently that it was a character of importance, and had been acquired through natural selection; as it is, the colour is probably in chief part due to sexual selection” (189)
In other words, woodpecker colors are not naturally selected to give them advantages in the forest ecosystems in which they compete with all other species. Rather, their colors are aesthetic developments that have to do with woodpecker culture and sociability: beauty and, well, fuckability.
If this all feels a little Richard-Attenborough-on-the-BBC, aka heteronormative, you’re not wrong. Darwin is presuming that animals are highly driven to mate, rather than proving it. But closer reading undermines that presumption in a way that Darwin invites: he is very clear in The Origin of Species that his concepts are more or less metaphors, deeply imperfect attempts at describing nature’s structures, which are far too complex for us dumb primates to understand: “I mean by Nature only the aggregate action and product of so many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us” (78, emphasis added). In fact, the productive central tension of the theory of evolution is that Darwin formulates it out of his observation of human domestication of plants and animals, when in reality nature works on a far more sophisticated level, meaning that we have to take biological concepts with a grain of salt:
“How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! How short his time! And consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those accumulated by Nature during whole geological periods! Can we wonder, then, that Nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?” (80)
This is important to keep in mind with sexual selection, to avoid imprinting on it the lazy heteronormativity that we can certainly understand Darwin would have taken as axiomatic. What’s exciting about the concept is that it’s an aesthetic one. Plants and animals devote significant time and energy to beauty and pleasure in their organic forms, which no matter how related to reproduction they might appear to be on the surface, are also obviously detours from that efficiency. As some mid-twentieth century biologist who’s name I’m forgetting once said: if the goal of evolution were purely reproduction we would just be small fluid sacs with overdeveloped reproductive tracts, breeding nonstop. We wouldn’t have music and painting—or bird feathers and humpack whale songs.
Darwin again:
“I willingly admit that a great number of male animals, as all out most gorgeous birds, some fishes, reptiles, and mammals, and a host of magnificently coloured butterflies, have been rendered beautiful for beauty’s sake; but this has been effected through sexual selection, that is, by the more beautiful males having been continually preferred by the females, and not for the delight of man. So it is with the music of birds…How the sense of beauty in its simplest form—that is, the reception of a peculiar kind of pleasure from certain colours, forms, and sounds—was first developed in the mind of man and of the lowest animals, is a very obscure subject.” (194, emphasis added)
Beauty for beauty’s sake arose out of sexual selection, quickly outpacing the concept. What does that make sex, then? A means to the creative ends of desire, pleasure, and beauty?
Darwin doesn’t really have a clear answer, which is the hallmark of a good thinker. He speculates that sex emerged gradually, like any other variation, as a strategy of life over millions of years (probably more like billions), not because there is a heterosexual principle at the root of biology, but because it’s a fairly efficient “division of labor” (90) for a non-teleological nature. Sexes (note that there doesn’t have to be two) allow for greater variation in populations, which is the hallmark of life over time in Darwin’s theory. He supposes that sexual reproduction, in particular, may give rise to more “vigorous” offspring because it combines many different traits and induces greater variation, but he admits there’s no solid evidence for this (93).
In other words, just as we think we’ve settled the matter of sex as reproduction and complementarity (i.e. male and female in humans), it falls apart for something much more interesting. Sex is also beauty for beauty’s sake and doesn’t serve reproduction in that sense. It ignites desire, beauty, and leads to incredible formal achievements from flowers to jazz. And this is what opens the door to a trans reading of Darwin.
Supernormal Stimuli (Why Trans Femmes are so Beautiful)
One of the most famous experiments in twentieth century biology established the concept of “supernormal stimuli.” Part of research on the relationship between instinct and learning, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen established in the late 1940s and early 1950s that exaggerated or aesthetically intense versions of typical stimuli deeply affected the behavior of certain breeds of gull birds (seagulls). In particular, famous experiments showed that when the birds were presented with larger than life, highly colored, but artificial facsimiles of their eggs, they would prefer taking care of the “supernormal” eggs over their real ones. Tinbergen also created a fake model of a seagull with its characteristic red bill and surmised that chicks pecked at the bill on the artificial bird because they color activated their instinct. That is, their basic impulse to eat was connected to an aesthetic judgment.
(As an aside, Tinbergen apparently truly loved seagulls, which led to a New York Times “Modern Love” column about him in 1974—a whole thing worth thinking about it its own right.)
This concept of the “supernormal stimulus” is meant to suggest that aspects of animal culture are biologically informed, or entangled. That is, we animals love pretty, attractive things, the bigger the better. The idea has been used to extrapolate in humans why we apparently love junk food, or pornography, although those kinds of extrapolations are quite tricky and the original experiments have since been problematized when scientists tried to recreate them.
Nevertheless, it’s an idea worth linking back to Darwin and pondering: what if being trans is just, like, supernormal? What I mean is, if sex is a concept that homes a tension between function and beauty, with potentially limitless variation in the flesh possible in the outcome, what could be more normal than changing sex?
Lots of animals change sex, by the way. We’ve known this for a long time. And in humans, the capacity to transition is built right into the body: anyone who’s taken hormone replacement therapy, or had a plastic surgery—cis and trans people both—knows how receptive the flesh is to change. We also do it all the time in growing from infancy to childhood to puberty to adulthood to old age. Our bodies are hardly static in sexual form and we hardly leave them to it without any culture interventions (hello, clothes and makeup).
It could merely be that trans sex is a supernormal iteration of what sex is always up to, intensifying the beautiful capacities of flesh to change in form over time. Throw the cis-trans distinction out the window, it’s garbage.
To be clear, I don’t think we need this explanation. Transphobia is social, not biological, so we don’t need biological arguments to defend trans people from attack. But what I’m drawn to in this pre-genetic, Darwinian paradigm is that biology is not deterministic or prescriptive, so it’s not longer the presumed ally of anti-transness. All the “trans people are biologically different in their brain!” arguments presume that being trans is a static, fixed situation, which is why we have to reluctantly accept our existence. There’s no beauty in the neurological account, no real stakes. We either accept that trans people exist, or try to eradicate them through a genocidal principle of biological warfare. No one asks what the conditions of trans life are, what forms it could take, or what beauties are our prerogative, our inheritance from, say, the gorgeous trans femmes that have walked this earth for a long time.
I’m generally not a fan of sexologists, but as a tease, consider a sideways reading of British sexologist Havelock Ellis’s early twentieth century term for trans people: “sexo-aesthetic inversion.” There’s a lot of baggage attached to inversion and I don’t mean to leap over it, but I wonder if we might read Ellis’s definition in light of Darwin (mind his homely 1913 syntax):
“This inversion is that by which a person’s tastes and impulses are so altered that, if a man, he emphasizes and even exaggerates the feminine characteristics in his own person, delights in manifesting feminine aptitudes and very especially, finds peculiar satisfaction in dressing himself as a woman and adopting a woman’s ways.”
Trans femininity, if we read it as an aesthetic matter proper to sex, could be understood as a celebratory matter of desire and pleasure, of stretching the self in the flesh to find home in unparalleled beauty, rather than being a pathology or abnormality—or some weird thing lodged in your brain somewhere that you have no say in.
This is a hypothesis with a tricky history to which I will attend in some longer writing. But when I look at how downright ugly the imaginary of terfs and other anti-trans agitators is, I’d rather try to live up to trans Darwin and the supernormal fact of transness as a gorgeous project of artful life.