 Thank you for your patience, folks, and sorry for the wait, it is my pleasure to introduce Antonia Forster for talking about LGBTQIA behaviour in animals. Thank you so much for coming. It's my pleasure to be here at Electro Magnetic Field. My name's Antonia, my background is in biological research. I did a bachelor's degree in Bristol on zoology, and then I did a Masters in Animal Behavior. I started a PhD in animal behaviour as well and ended up going into science communication and presenting full-time. So my personal background is that I identify as bisexual, which means I'm attracted to both men and women and anyone in between. I think the word pansexual is equally valid, but for me personally the word bi is more appropriate. I'm also polyamorous, which means I'm not monogamous, so that means I think it's possible to have more than one loving relationship at the same time. Full disclosure, I'm also single, so clearly that's working really well for me, but I sound by it anyway. Now in my personal life I didn't always in the past come out visibly, by all particularly as polyamorous, and that's because there was so much misunderstanding in the world of LGBT and also around polyamory. You hear a lot of things like it's not right, it's sinful or it's immoral or it's corrupting, but there's one phrase in particular that really aggrieved me every time I heard it, and that is that LGBTQI way is somehow not natural. Anyone put your hand up if you've ever heard that before? I'm sure nearly all of you. That's really depressing, right? It's a really really common idea somehow that being either even things like gender non-conforming or even women who don't fit traditional gender roles, we often hear this word unnatural. It's often used to defend bigotry and move away from that mic a little bit. So I found that particularly interesting because my area of expertise is biology, which is a study of what is and is not natural. So I really wanted to break down this particular stereotype, that particular word use. As a result I wrote a talk, I presented it at a few different festivals at the Royal Society at Kew Gardens and then last November I presented it at TED, or TEDx actually in Bristol to 2,000 people and I also came out to my family as both by and Polly as part of that TEDx talk. Ironically, one of the things that one of my parents told me is you don't see the animals doing this, which is literally what this talk is about as you're about to see. So it made me realise that this is actually a really necessary topic to talk about. I've looked up stats since then and there's a website called Pink News that did a survey in the UK only a year and a half ago which found that four in ten British people agreed that homosexual sex is not natural and the percentage of respondents is much higher in other countries. The UK is particularly generally quite liberal in compared to other countries use on those things. So I really wanted to address what do we mean by the word natural? What does that actually mean and is homosexuality or bisexuality or sex in general? What do we see in nature? So natural by definition I'm sure you're aware means things that we see in nature, things that are not exclusive to humans and obviously we do lots of things that are not natural. We do things animals don't do so we drive cars and we talk on phones and we wear clothes and if you're going to talk about social constructs I would argue that actually straight marriage is not natural because you don't see animals actually getting married unless you have an Etsy account and too much time in your hands in which case that's great. But you don't see anyone protesting straight weddings on the basis that they're not natural because frankly that's obviously a ridiculous argument. The idea that everything natural is good and everything unnatural is bad is something called the guia fallacy and it's really easy to disprove because cyanide is natural but it's not very good for you. So clearly that argument falls apart but it did give me wondering do we actually see homosexuality and bisexuality in animals? So I started looking into the papers and the answer is yes we do, we see it all across the board. We actually see homosexuality in or it should be more specific homosexual behaviour in more than 1,500 different species of animals and in a third of those it's a regular occurrence so it can't be put down to fluke. And it's really diverse we see it in all kinds of animals like Asian and African elephants. We see it in lions, in giraffes, in dolphins, in several different species of penguins, in dragonflies. Personally I don't know how you can even tell in a dragonfly, there you go. And also interestingly every species of great ape which is our closest ancestor evolutionarily so we see it in orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and imbinobos. In fact in binobos the vast majority of them are pansexual so they interact with each other regardless of sex and 60% of their mating behaviour actually happens between two females so that is the norm for that species. We also see homosexual animals raising young so in New York's Central Park Zoo there are two male chinstrap penguins called Roy and Silo. I can see some of you nodding that you've heard this story already. So a zookeeper saw them spending a lot of time together and eventually saw them taking turns trying to hatch stone. That's the correct response. So the zookeeper knew that there was another heterosexual or heteroromantic I suppose penguin couple who had a spare egg that they weren't nesting. Quite often a female penguin will lay multiple eggs and won't hatch them all. There's a sort of insurance policy. So the zookeeper took the unattended egg and gave it to Roy and Silo and they turned sitting on it. They did a great job and it hatched and it turned into a healthy female chick called Tango. That story was written up into a children's book. I like this corner of the room. Called Tango Makes Three and it's a children's book and it teaches children that love is what makes a family, not necessarily a traditional family structure. So clearly we do see homosexual behaviour and bisexual or pansexual behaviour in animals. But what about transsexuality or gender fluidity? Before we get into that there's a very important distinction that has to be made between sex and gender. To do that I like to use this diagram by Sam Killerman which is called the gender bread person. Which is informative and delicious. This is a really nice diagram to explain the difference between your gender expression. That's how you appear so it might include what you wear. Your gender identity, that's who you are, that's in your head. Your orientation, that's who you love or are attracted to. And your biological sex, so that's your physical body. Now those things don't have to appear to match. So someone who is transsexual for example might have a biological sex of one sex and have a gender identity of the other. But also all of these things are along a spectrum, they're not a binary. So it's very easy for us to understand that gender expression is a spectrum. Because we can dress in a more masculine way or a more feminine way and we can express ourselves in many different ways along that spectrum. Your orientation is also a spectrum. There's something called the Kinsey scale. Which argues that very few people are maybe 100% homosexual or heterosexual. Maybe it's more common to fall somewhere along a spectrum. I'm bisexual but I wouldn't say I'm 50% exactly attracted to males and females in the same way for the same reasons at the same time. And it's more complicated and it also changes over time. Your gender identity is also a spectrum. So lots of people may identify as 100% female or 100% male but many people will identify with aspects of both genders or neither. Or be queer or gender fluid which is where it may change over time. But from a biological scientific point of view we don't speak of animals as having gender. It's a sort of identity construct. We have gender in the sense that we impose it upon them which is a sort of more complex conversation. But from here on in I'm only going to be talking about biological sex when referring to animals. So in humans we can broadly say that biological sex is determined by chromosomes. So in biologically male fetuses there'll be an X and a Y chromosome which look like this and in a biologically female fetus it will be an X and an X chromosome. Now it's really important to clarify that even at the most fundamental level where we're talking about chromosome or sex there are variations. There may be people who are chromosomeally intersex people who have XXY or X0 or XXX chromosomes. Even if someone does have XX or XY chromosomes that affects their hormonal development which may be along a more 100% male fetal development path or it may be along a different path. Hormonal development then affects your gonadal development which then affects your phenotype how you appear on the outside. So this is a multi-layered development and even at that level it is very complicated even in humans it's definitely not a binary. But can we assume that the same thing happens in animals? Well let's think about the birds and the bees and start with the birds. So birds also have sex chromosomes a bit like humans but males have the ZZ chromosome and females have ZW. So females are what we call the hetero gamete and males are the homo gamete. So already we can see that that's the opposite of human chromosomal development so the human model is by no means the norm. And in bees it's radically different. So the way a colony of bees works if you see a colony of bees buzzing away typically all the bees you're looking at will be female because the male bees have a very short lifespan. In a colony of bees there's one queen who is the reproducducer, she's female and there's lots and lots of workers which are her daughters. They're typically sterile, they don't typically mate, they're all female. The males are called drones, you can see a male on the right here they're a bit different in terms of their body size and their shape and their eyes. They're basically born in order to have sex and then they die. So that's it, it's a short life. A male bee actually doesn't do any work so its only goal is to reproduce. And the female reproducer, which is the queen, can very precisely control whether she's laying a male or a female egg because if she fertilizes an egg then it becomes a female, a slave worker typically. And if she doesn't fertilize an egg it becomes a male. So male bees come from unfertilized eggs it means that male bees have no father which is an interesting thing to comprehend. So sex determination in bees is obviously very very different to in humans. Looking at animals allows us to reassess things that we assume are always true. Maybe assumptions that we don't even recognize. For example we tend to assume that male animals will have a penis and that female animals won't. And that's not even something we see in humans all the time but it's also not something we see in animals. We've got examples like the spotted hyena. So this is a female spotted hyena and she has genitals which are called a pseudo penis which is actually an enlarged clitoris. It looks almost identical to male genitalia except it's larger. And she's also able to give birth through it which is quite an achievement. I like the mixed response from the audience especially the ladies. So one way that researchers can actually tell female hyenas from male it's very difficult to sex them which is to determine their sex based on their genitals but if they've given birth they have a small amount of scar tissue which is a lighter color so that's how you can actually tell that this one is a female. So that's an assumption that we might not even think about. We might not even realize that we're making that association until we see something which is an exception. Now so far all of the animals I talked about have permanent sexes. By that I mean they're either male or female and that doesn't change over time but that's not the case for all animals. Some animals change sex over time which is called a sequential hermaphrodite and a really famous example of this is clownfish. In a school of clownfish there's typically only one female and she's the biggest and most important fish. She's highest in the hierarchy but if she dies it's a pretty tragic affair the next largest fish in the group which is a male will actually turn into a female to replace her which would make the movie Finding Nemo entirely different. But I would like that. There's also animals which are both sexes at the same time and this is something called a simultaneous hermaphrodite. There's lots of examples, most slugs and snails. My favourite example personally is the banana slug. The reason they're my favourite is because their Latin name is dolocophallus which means enormous penis. And it comes out of their head like a pornographic unicorn. So when they want to mate both, well all banana slugs have both male and female genitalia. So when they want to mate they form this beautiful yellow ynghyngyang and they insert their male genitalia into the female opening of the other and they laterally exchange sperm. But actually their genitals are so large that quite often they become stuck and if that happens they have to do something called apophilation which means chewing it off. So that's natural. And actually sea slugs take it a step further. So sea slug genitals are sharp like a spear and they don't actually have a female opening to receive genitals. They actually just stab it wildly into the side of the other individual. That act is called traumatic insemination. It is traumatic so it's aptly named. Each individual wants to stab the other while not being stabbed themselves. And in flatworms which these are, this is evolved into a competitive behaviour which is known as penis fencing. So each individual wants to stab the other and wants to avoid the trauma itself. And then it gains because the other individual is the one that has to invest and carry the young. You can see another picture of penis fencing there. I've also learned recently for different reasons penis fencing is a behaviour that you also see in grey whales. But I did not include a picture of that because it's quite strong even for my talks. If you do want to see that, feel free to Google it. Don't blame me if you get put on a list. So you can see that the sexual diversity and the different ways animals mate in the wild is really, really diverse. It's really hard to say what is and is not natural. So are there any animals that have fewer than two sexes? Are there only animals which just have one sex? Indeed there are. This is actually a lizard called the desert grassland whiptail lizard. And in this species there are never any males at any time. The females just lay eggs which are clones of themselves in a process called parthenogenesis. That process is something lots of animals can do. Snakes have been known to do it sometimes. Hammerhead sharks have been documented to do it. But it's very rare for a species to do that exclusively. So the desert grassland whiptail lizard will only reproduce by laying eggs which don't need to be fertilised. What I find really interesting though is they don't do this all the time. A female actually only lays eggs when she's been mounted or climbed on top of by another female. Something called pseudo copulation. So they're a very empowered species I think. That made me wonder if there are species with only one sex are there species with more than two sexes? And this is where I really had to leave behind all of the buzz feed and listicles and really, really dig into the research because you don't get reports on these very often but they do exist. This is a single-celled animal which is called tetrahymena thermofila and it actually has seven different mating types which functionally are the same as sexes. What's particularly interesting is the mating type of one tetrahymena thermofila has no bearing on its young. I suppose young is maybe not the right word but the offspring that it produces, it can be of any mating type and it can produce a tetrahymena thermofila of any of seven mating types. It's able to mate with any type except its own which is why we functionally use them as equivalent to sexes. This is a fungus called schizophyllum commune and it actually has 28,000 different mating types which is absolutely incredible. It's to do with the way that the genome recombines. It's got four different places where it's able to recombine. So it's actually not unusual for fungi to have many different mating types but it is unusual to have more than a few thousand so 28,000 is very highly unusual. By looking at all of this research into the animal kingdom and looking at the way sex works or doesn't work the different behaviours that we see and the fact that sex is not only not a binary but that species can survive with just one or more than two really goes to show that it's very hard to say something is or is not natural. So that's what I want everyone to take away from this. Not that, I can't think of how to quite phrase it, just that if you hear anyone saying using the phrase it's not natural to try and defend bigotry not only you shouldn't be using biology to try and defend bigotry but it's an entirely farcical argument so I encourage you to take this away and use that as ammunition in that kind of discussion. Thank you very much. I've been encouraged to take a Q&A afterwards so I'll be waiting kind of out there I guess or in here, depends where everyone collates. So if you do have any questions for me feel free to find me after this talk at any time during EMF camp. I'm very happy to take questions or if you have any questions but you're not able to grab me then do please tweet me and I'll be very very happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you very much for coming. Have a great weekend. Thank you.