Natural history and gender
• Gender Outsiders: Transgendered & Others
Laura Spinney of The Guardian reviews Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People
Jonathan Roughgarden, a theoretical ecologist and marine biologist of some repute. A few months later, at 52, she underwent a sex change to become a transgendered woman. ...
"I was looking at all these people and realizing that my discipline said they weren't possible," she recalls. "Homosexuality is not supposed to exist, according to biology."
... a biology professor at Stanford University she would explore how widespread variation in gender and sexuality was in animals. She was forced to give up some administrative responsibilities and started to catalogue homosexuality in other species.
What she found astounded her. Studies document same-sex courtship rituals and mating in more than 300 species. Still more species have multiple genders, or exhibit gender reversal and hermaphroditism. Yet no one had collated them, no one had sought to explain this phenomenon.