I realise this would be hard to determine as being the wrong gender is such a subjective internal experience but I was wondering as it seems not that uncommon in humans is there any evidence that its something that can also be seen in other animals?
We should probably stick to mammals, because of course you have creatures like certain sea-snakes that can actually change sex.
btw I know what a lot of these threads are like, this is not a ‘gotcha’ in any way.
You’re suggesting something like a lesbian cow trapped in the body of a bull? Forced by social expectations to have sex with cows in the guise of a cis-bull rather than having same-sex relations with other cows as the cow it truly knows itself to be?
Sorry, I’m not seeing it. I don’t feel non-human animals have the level of self-awareness needed to have a gender identity much less the wrong gender identity for their body. I doubt a bull is capable of forming the thought “I am a bull” much less “I should be a cow.”
We had an elderly hen that started to crow and tried to mate with the rest of the flock. But she was 8 years old when her breed normally lives for less than 5. There is a form of ovarian cancer that chickens can get that causes these hormone changes and we put it down to that.
Probably not exactly what you’re looking for, but she certainly spent the last few months of her life thinking she was male and acting like it.
The only clues we have to the mental gender of non-speaking animals are in their mating behaviors. While we can certainly observe, say, a female bird attempting to mate with other females, we can’t distinguish whether that means that the bird is homosexual or transgendered (assuming that the species’ mental processes are even sophisticated enough to make that distinction meaningful at all).
Many years ago, I remember a discussion with a fellow who grew up on a farm, and he said that gay animals were not uncommon - cows that tried to mount other cows (same with mares), etc. It’s not that unusual.
I suppose the reverse is difficult, (IANA Biologist) because a lot of animal kingdom male behaviour is pheromone driven, they are attracted to females in heat - so a bull or stallion isn’t going to get the Liberace treatment since he can’t produce pheromones.
Thanks for the answers everyone, yes I suspected that it would be difficult to tell as it requires a certain level of self-awareness, though if (as is currently indicated) transexualism has a physical basis in the brain then that should also be replicated in other mammals at least.
This thread was inspired by a conversation I had with colleague who joked that her male dog always squatted to pee and she thought he must be transexual as a result.
Edited to add, I grew up on a farm as well md2000, so I’ve seen that behaviour, its pretty common. I’ve also seen it used as an example of animals being gay, like transexuality I would suggest that requires a level of self-awareness and identity that a bull (for example) is lacking.
My boy dog tried walking into the women’s restroom yesterday. I told him he needs to go into the men’s restroom because he is a boy! I then added “Unless you are a transsexual.”
Moderator NOTE, NOT a warning.
This is the kind of response to a question in General Questions that is basically useless to the discussion. Don’t do it again.
samclem, moderator
In post #15 of Reyemile’s thread entitled Gender Fluidity, I found some recent research about neurologists switching the gender of rats back and forth by giving or suppressing a certain brain hormone.
I’ll requote my quote here:
[QUOTE=Fiona MacDonald]
researchers in the US have managed to flip the gender of the brains of newborn rats, causing physically female rodents to behave like males.
[…]
the team injected 10-day-old female mice with a substance that acts like estradiol, a steroid that surges during the development of male rats,[…] Estradiol works by inhibitingDNA methyltransferase (Dnmt), an enzyme that usually silences certain genes. By blocking the action of Dnmt, these genes were ‘unsilenced’ and able to trigger the masculinsation process - even after the ‘window’ of sexual differentiation had closed.
“Physically, these animals were females, but in their reproductive behaviour, they were males,” […]
Not only did their behaviour change dramatically, but the rats’ brains also structurally transformed. […]
This is one of the first studies to help unravel the mysterious process of sex differentiation in the brain, and shows that continual Dnmt exposure is necessary throughout development to ensure that a brain turns female.
“It was thought that once established, sexual differentiation could not be undone,” […] “Our work shows that sex differences in brain and behaviour are epigenetically regulated, meaning that sex differences are not hardwired in our DNA but programmed during development.”
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think non-human mammals have much, if any, awareness of “gender.” Sex isn’t really all that important in most mammals lives-they only have sex in order to reproduce, once a year or so, or in the case of many males in polygamous species, never. If a male deer “felt” female I presume he’d just not get involved in the mating fights and unlike in human society, no one would try to pressure him into acting differently. You see “homosexual” behavior fairly often, but I doubt it is true homosexuality, it’s just frustrated horny animals seeking relief.
I don’t know about that. The animal kingdom seems to be pretty darned gay at times, even when other options are readily available. Quoth Wiki on gay animals:
Some male birds will form stable homosexual pairings, and then… well, let’s call it *adopt *children:
Or, take sheep:
And then you have, for instance, bonobos, who are known to shag mostly everything and everyone.
Humans are the only animals who have sex in order to reproduce, and it’s rare even among us. All other animals, and most humans, have sex just because it feels good.
Of course, it feels good because it leads to reproduction, and there’s therefore a strong evolutionary pressure towards it feeling good, but that’s not what’s going through an animal’s mind at the time.
I don’t know that “feeling good” is exactly the right way to phrase it. A female cat in heat WANTS to be mated, but the actual sex act is painful, because (for reasons I’d really like to have explained) that particular pain is necessary to stimulate ovulation. I don’t know that a barbed penis qualifies as “feels good” just because hormone levels make the poor thing nutty for copulation.
And that’s not exclusive to cats. You ever seen ducks mate? Poor hens get chased until they’re too worn out to escape, get gang-raped and pushed under water until they nearly drown, and some of them do drown. I don’t think that counts as “feeling good” either.
i wonder if there have been any gender non-conforming chromosomal or hormonal abnormalities in non-human mammals. I can’t think of why they would have been tested, but since they happen in humans I would certainly think they happen in other species.
I expect that there’s probably been a lot of study of chromosomal and hormonal abnormalities in animals (domesticated ones, at least), because those abnormalities usually lead to decreased or zero fertility, and breeders want to maximize fertility for their livestock.
Is going to be very difficult to really pin down animal behavior to transsexualism vs some other social need. Males, for example wolves, dogs or small primates, will allow another may to mount them, but that’s chalked down to submissive display. How would you define it as transsexualism, if a small male is constantly mounted, maybe that’s all he can do. Or maybe he’s one of the rarely noted, and controversial, gay animals. Transsexualism would involve not only switched mating roles, but also other social effects. And there just aren’t that many outside of human societies. Both genders, of the above species, play with babies, an example. Only our crowing hen, above, has added another behavior outside of mating. But again, that could be just another facet of dominance.
Among most species other than humans and bonobos sex is not a very important part of life. However, skipping over the issues of cats and birds, most female mammals seem to enjoy the actual mating. Female horses, if left to their own devices, come into heat, breed, and then have no interest in sex for the rest of the year. However, if we remove all intact males and keep a female horse confined she comes into heat once a month or so. Many a mare has been observed masturbating during heat by backing up onto objects. There was also a study I saw a long time ago that measured brain waves of female mammals during mating and claimed most of them had signals suggestive of an orgasm.
But back to the thread: How would you know if your pet dog felt trapped in a male body? Dogs only have sex when the females go into heat. Your male dog is never going to come into heat. Both male and female dogs engage in humping behaviors. There are very few sex-specific behaviors that dogs engage in that you could watch for.
It’s hard to find the articles I used to have because apparently a transgender group won something called the Glass Lion Award, but there have been a small handful of articles about something in the realm of trans/genderqueer/gender non-conforming lions, all the cases I’m aware of have been FtM:
I recall that there’s one that went even further than that lion and takes on the full social role of a male lion (as in, actually killing the pride leader of another pride and assuming the lead role).
That doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be transgendered, it just means that they wouldn’t understand what was wrong. They’d “feel wrong” all the time but never know why.
I would fall back on the theme of Melville’s Moby Dick. Namely that you can’t get revenge on an animal. You have to be sufficiently self-aware to be able to feel complex higher emotions like revenge or transgenderism. And animals, even higher mammals, are not. You can teach most any dog what “Biscuit” means, but you could never teach any animal what “Biscuit tomorrow” means.
So it’s a moot point.