thursday's linkspam has far to go

[sciatrix]

I have hit my first Annoyed Nitpicking Snag on The Body Keeps the Score, which is: the left-brain analytical right-brain emotional divide is not that simple and not nearly as pat as he is making it out to be, and it has left me grumpy.

Whether or not I am using that crankiness as a shield to avoid really engaging is an exercise for the observer.

Anyway, have some links I dug up while trawling my DMs with my collaborators, for future use:

Queering chemicals (EDCs): A bibliography

There is a class of environmental toxicants that are known for their ‘queer-making’ effects. Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, or EDCs, produce a wide swath of health issues, including cancers, diabetes, and heart disease that disproportionately impact already marginalized communities (Murphy 2017). Recently, scientists have begun linking EDCs to supposed ‘sexual abnormalities’: stories of gay birds and trans frogs have sounded the alarm on possible impacts to human sex, gender, and sexuality. ‘Queering’ refers to practices of questioning, historicizing and “making strange” often taken for granted categories associated with sex, gender, and sexuality. The following is a bibliography of this literature.

Tidepool creatures bend the sex rules we take for granted

We humans are accustomed to thinking of sexual function as being both fixed and segregated into bodies that we designate as either female or male. In the larger animal kingdom sex doesn’t always follow our rules. Many animals are monoecious, or hermaphroditic, having both male and female sex organs in the same body. Not only that, but lots of animals change from one sex to the other. As in so many aspects of biology, the way humans do sex may be thought of by us as “normal,” but it isn’t necessarily the most interesting way.

Scientists Genetically Engineered Flies to Ejaculate Under Red Light

Their experiments confirm that sex is pleasurable, even for animals we think of as simple.

(I'm really curious to think about how you would engineer a similar thing to study female flies.)

Coming out Darwinian: Is it time to rewrite the story of sex?

All coming-out stories are members of the same genus, if not the same species. Mine, however, has one distinguishing trait: along my path to understanding and accepting that I was gay, the obstacle of my religious upbringing was aided and abetted by none other than Charles Darwin. That is, there was a time when I told myself that the uncomfortable feelings I had for male friends and classmates could not possibly be real, because they would be wrong and sinful, and also because they were impossible in a world shaped by natural selection.

Heterosexism in a scientific study of lesbian attraction

An evolutionary psychology study that gained much media attention in May 2017 claims to show women’s sexual attraction to other women is the outcome of evolution, specifically for the pleasure of heterosexual men. The study was reported widely as ‘homosexual women evolved for men’s pleasure.’ Journalists have not read the study nor linked to it. The study is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The study is led by Associate Professor Menelaos Apostolou. The team is based at the University of Nicosia, with apparently only one woman co-author.

“Categories aren’t these things that are just there”: An interview with the CLEAR Lab’s Queer Science Reading Group

What does it mean to do queer science—or, rather, to do a queer science?

Comments

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Oooh, fascinating. Will definitely take a look at these.

[wellthisisnice]

Have you heard about the Colombian ecologist Brigitte Baptiste? She gave a talk about queer ecology in 2017 (available dubbed on YouTube) that may be of interest here, since it's coming from the perspective of an out trans scientist in a position of power, being the director of a research institute.

[sciatrix]

I had not! I'll have to look into that.

[jesse_the_k]

Queer science FTW, thank you for that link.

[sciatrix]

No worries! Glad folks appreciate it. <3

[notasupervillain]

I have a question, and you might be a person who can actually answer it. I've heard of gay animals, intersex animals, etc. I was working on a manuscript about antlers and it occurred to me that I don't know if anyone's researched trans animals. There's social behaviour in animals that's tied to gender but not specifically to genitals. I think of the elephant, where adult females herd and adult males live alone. Sure, you could make arguments about biological necessity, but those same arguments would hold for gay animals (well, maybe not for the lesbian penguins, but certainly for the gay necrophilic duck!) Is there any research on that?

[sciatrix]

So what I usually see is that people still talk about homosexuality/"gendered" behavior in animals as though they're points along the same continuum. In fact, the notion that animals have a gender (rather than a sex) is actually pretty controversial, because people worry about anthropormophizing them, and gender is often explicitly defined as a humans-only thing. I'm highly tempted to write up a review pointing out that animals have social categories and differences in the way they relate to one another that correlate broadly with sex but not perfectly, and that it makes sense in a number of taxa to refer to two sexes and three or more genders.

Another problem is that no one is really looking for this in the same way no one is really looking at homosexual behavior in animals, and when it does appear it's referred to in a very, very wide variety of frameworks and observations, so it's very hard to do a literature review and track down prevalence in multiple taxa. It might be done, but I'm personally staring at the idea and wincing, because a huge part of that paper will be doing the same kind of thing as Bailey & Zuk, which spends an awful lot of time patiently explaining this problem in the context of homosexuality. You'd be amazed at how frequently things like genital contact are defined as not sexual at all in the field.

(Of course, this led to me trolling my collaborators by asking them to define sexual behavior, and gleefully poking holes in the possibilities they brought up. Sex is confusingly broad, and good luck narrowing it down any time soon.)

[notasupervillain]

Three genders? I suppose you mean animals like ants and naked mole rats? Or something else?

I can't define sexual contact in humans, so there's no way I could do it in something where I understood their brains even less than humans. Behaviour which at least one of the parties involved finds arousing? Since animals don't make porn or have any other reason I can think of to engage in sexual behaviour that neither of them are turned on by? But then you'd need to MRI them and see when their brains lit up for arousal, and good luck with that in an ant.

I'm disappointed no one has looked at trans animals, but not surprised, I guess. Everyone acted as if gay animals were so shocking, when the more I read the more it seems like it's just something that happens sometimes.