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.)