In for 2024? Gender binary-defying birds. Out? Pretending that “biological sex” can be neatly defined. Last year, a zoologist discovered a bird that is “half female, half male,” and honestly, she’s serving.
While on vacation in Colombia in 2022, Hamish Spencer, a professor of zoology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, spotted a blue and green wild honeycreeper bird with the help of amateur ornithologist John Murrillo, according to a press release from the university. The report on Spencer’s and Murillo’s find was published last month in the Journal of Field Ornithology.
Typically, green honeycreeper females have green feathers, while males have blue feathers. But this girlie (gender neutral) has a near-even split of green and blue plumage, which is also just a beautiful sight to behold. Because they didn’t capture the bird, it’s unknown whether it has male and female reproductive organs, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
This phenomenon — when animals have both male and female characteristics in a species that usually has separate sexes — is referred to as “bilateral gynandromorphy,” and it’s extremely rare. As Spencer notes in the press release, “Many birdwatchers could go their whole lives and not see a bilateral gynandromorph in any species of bird.”
According to Spencer, bilateral gynandromorphy is the result of a genetic “error.” But what if, instead of calling this anamoly an “error,” we saw the existence of creatures like the half-blue half-green green honeycreeper as a mistake, but simply as evidence that sex can’t be so neatly defined? As the release states, “[Spencer] hopes the novel discovery will inspire people to ‘treasure exceptions’ as they always reveal something interesting."
The notion that gender is what we feel while sex is what we’re born with is a fairly common one in queer communities at this point, but as the green honeycreeper bird shows us, the latter isn’t so cut and dry. And we have always exposed the futility of attempting to categorize the endless possibilities of the natural world. In both birds and humans, there is no error; only infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
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