Awfully queer science

“Historically, queerness and science have been bitter enemies. Queerness has been Science’s BIGGEST cover-up operation.” Gosh – who knew?

I was at a seminar hosted by the LGBTQ+ journal club of Oxford University’s biology department, who had invited guest speaker Ross Brooks (he/him) from Oxford Brookes University (no relation) on the other side of town. Dr Brooks, a historian, was promoting his research into Darwin’s views on all things queer, to be revealed in a forthcoming book Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life. That the book is to be published by Yale University Press is itself evidence of Brooks’s claim that queerness (whatever this means) is now a part of science. That Brooks had been invited to talk at Oxford’s famous biology department, the birthplace of The Selfish Gene and plenty more besides, may be seen as further evidence.

But the fact that it is a part of science does not mean that it should be one.

For several years we have been showered with pronoun badges, rainbow lanyards, gender unicorn posters, and all manner of gender identity flags. And such heavy promotion of queer iconography seems to have taken effect: the lecture theatre, in the University’s sparkling new Life and Mind Building, was packed. Representatives from every corner of the department filed in: students, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty professors, and administrative staff. Students from other departments. I estimated 120-150 people in total. The anticipation was palpable.

From Brooks’s text-laden power-point slides, we learned:

• Darwin “perpetuated stereotypes” from the “sexual mores of the Victorian age”, through his endless fascination with sexual selection. Oh Darwin.
• Darwin was “obsessed” with how males and females evolved. Oh Darwin!
• Darwin had an exclusive focus on heteronormativity. Oh Darwin!!

However (!), those same notebooks were “full” of “queer creatures”:

• He documented numerous intersex species. There was no attempt to explain what this means, but it sounds queer. Yes Darwin!
• He was beguiled by seahorses, where the males are so queer that they actually give birth. Yes Darwin!
• He documented birds with plumage more commonly seen in the opposite sex. Trans birds? Yes Darwin!!

The apparent fascination with queer creatures led Darwin to a “startling conclusion”, scrawled in a private notebook: “Every man and woman is hermaphrodite”. Brooks recounted this finding with gusto — it was Darwin’s “vision of intersex origins”! He conceded that Darwin chose not to express his revelation in published works (we wonder why?), yet, we were told, it remains “a key component in his sexological evolutionism”.  We were not told what this means.

While the quotation’s context could have been made clearer, it appears that Darwin was referring to embryological observations that male and female mammals (including humans) share a common embryonic template. Men have nipples! Hermaphrodites are organisms that possess both male and female reproductive organs, either at the same time (such as in earthworms) or sequentially during their lifetimes (such as in clownfish).

It seemed remiss of Brooks not to mention that, under current understanding, mammals are ancestrally gonochoristic (having separate sexes), with no evidence that this condition evolved from hermaphroditic ancestors in the mammalian lineage. This is true despite ongoing uncertainties about the deeper evolutionary origins of separate sexes in early multicellular animals. In any case, it’s quite a stretch to equate Darwin’s speculation that hermaphroditism might have been the evolutionary precursor of separate sexes to a considered view that every man and woman is a hermaphrodite. It is even less clear as to why this is relevant to “queer theory” (which still has not been defined). Is it a belief of queer theory that mammals are hermaphrodites?

We learned how Darwin commented on traits whose expression shifts between males and females across related species (or evolutionary lineages), a phenomenon more recently described as “cross–sexual transfer” (West-Eberhard, 2003), though again the relevance to queer theory was not clear. We were shown a picture of “Fanny and Stella”, the two Victorian cross-dressers who were sensationally, scandalously, tried for sodomy and cross-dressing in 1871. The only relevance here is that The Descent of Man was, coincidentally, published at around the same time. Yet Brooks drew “no small amount of amusement” in an apparent irony: as Darwin regaled about the beauty of human female fashions from an evolutionary perspective, contrasting this with birdlife for which males are typically more flamboyant, “probably the two most famous people to wear them at the time” (Fanny and Stella) … were men! He suggested that this emphasised the queerness intermittently expressed in Darwin’s theories. I’m afraid the jokewas lost on me but, in my defence, no one else was laughing either.

It was disappointing that he declined to directly answer even this unchallenging biology question

There was only time for one question. Is the concept of “Cross Sexual Transfer” unhelpfully pushing the narrative of a sex binary? Darwin didn’t know the mechanisms of sex determination, whereas we now know that males and females have (mostly) the same genes. Brooks’s reply — this is a science question, I’m not a scientist (before going off on a tangent about beetles). There’s nothing wrong with a historian giving a talk to a biology department, of course, yet it was disappointing that he declined to directly answer even this unchallenging biology question.

If you like your queer history with lashings of seahorse and a side-helping of Victorian scandal, give Brooks’s book a go. (Who knows — perhaps it has substance that was somehow left out of this seminar.) If, on the other hand, you are wondering in bewilderment and no little concern at how we got to the point of biology departments platforming queer interpretations of Darwin’s notebooks, all I can say is — you are not alone.