Crossdressers-Haven.com

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45215617

It's not just among Humans. Several species of birds of prey are known to have transvestic behavior in their population, some as much as 40% of males!!! Rather striking, that.

interesting

Leeza

Extrapolating to animals is risky I think. Maybe that's just normal male behavior in marsh harriers. It reminds me of the time a friend of mine made the comment that a bird was singing out of tune.

Zari

From what I read in the article, the "transvestism" is in the nature of a novel way to insure reproductive success, not some deliberate wish to present or behave as female. That is often the problem with extrapolating from critters to human critters, especially in terms of what is cultural behavior to some extent among people, rather than an adaptive behavior to insure spreading around an individuals ability to reproduce. In the Marsh Harrier, by not being seen as a competitive male, the male with a more feminine size and plumage avoids the competitive combat that the territorial type A male birds engage in, and spend enomous amounts of energy on. That lets the less aggressive male devote more time to making love, not war, while the more aggressive males burn off energy defending territory. Makes good sense, actually.

The same applies to a few species of fish, some of which will spontaneously switch sex if there is a reproductive imbalance. The survival of the species is paramount.

I do know that there are studies that have examined GLB as adaptive strategies among people to insure that large families have what are essentially nursemaids and godparents built in, as the gay males in particular dote on their neices and nephews and help in their education and other advantages. So there may be adaptive strategies even among human beinks. Not sure where TG/TS might come in, as often families fall apart when the individual parent comes out or is exposed and that would seem to be maladaptive for their offspring, eh?

Interesting to speculate, though.
Carolynn

Carolynn wrote:In the Marsh Harrier, by not being seen as a competitive male, the male with a more feminine size and plumage avoids the competitive combat that the territorial type A male birds engage in, and spend enomous amounts of energy on. That lets the less aggressive male devote more time to making love, not war, while the more aggressive males burn off energy defending territory. Makes good sense, actually.

Absolutely.

The thing about aggressive behaviour amongst men, though, if you see it as a generic thing acting over the course of human history is that it is a basically expansionary force. I mean humanity has expanded from its insignificant base in Africa to totally dominate the planet, achieving all sorts of things (including bad things). It's done this in a relatively short geological period and surely this would not have occurred without a great deal of aggression, mostly on the part of men.

So I'd argue, that in human males, the long-term genetic advantage of aggression has been for the species in general - at the expense of other species and, now, maybe even the planet as a whole. It's not been about defence (of one's territory) but of expansion (in all sorts of senses, not just physical).

Long ago mankind occupied most corners of the globe, but competetive aggression, sublimated into technological (and maybe political and social - e.g. in democracy) advance has still been a driver in the last several millenia.

The difficulty is to find ways of usefully sublimating this competitive male aggression. I think we're in one of those periods now where we can't fit it all into the cultural/political/social possibilities avalaible (particularly in the West). So then it often gets used up in futile fighting other men pretty much for the sake of it.

Not sure where TG/TS might come in, as often families fall apart when the individual parent comes out or is exposed and that would seem to be maladaptive for their offspring, eh?

Interesting to speculate, though.
Carolynn

If you argue that the male adopting the male role has been essential to the success of humanity (on a narrative like the one I'm using above), then "female" men are construed as some sort of deep threat. I have a feeling it is that, in part, which underlies the falling apart of familes for out TS/TGs. But, if you're at a period in which explicitly "male" men are struggling to fit their energies into the available positive avenues, perhaps there is room for change.

I have always viewed the early culturally valued male aggression as the vehicle for what biologists know as adaptive radiation, where a species discovers a new niche and expands to fill it comletely, before the big bust that almost inevitabley hits a population that expands unchecked. So far that doesn't seem to have happened to us. I find it fascinating that wars, local fights and raids extracts about the same percentage of deaths from a given population, actually a few percentage points more in technologically less sophisticated than in our own societies, about 28% vs about 13% in fact. It seems to be that it is safer living in our expansionist society with killing technology better than spears than living in for example among the Yanamomo, though those stats came before they were started to be assimilated. We might expect that civilization has decrease the deaths by war, while increasing deaths by disease.

We have, as a species, been challenged several time, once between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago where there was an apparent population bottle neck that some assoicted with wourld wide volcanism, and the human population is thought to have dropped to about 10,000 world wide (however the data comes from reasearch in Africa and Europe, and I can find little to corroborate it in Asia).

The Black Death during the middle ages and the menomic nursery rhyme description of the symptoms), and the related effects of the Little Ice Age that lasted between, about 1350-1860s, was another period that reduced population pretty much world wide, but was not a bottleneck of the sort the species struggled through 90,000 years ago.

I thought for awhile that the Aids epeidemic might be a serious blip, but our technology and culture has permitted that to be under control as more of a chronic illness now. I guess we are able to use our technology and population as a sink to deal with these little bobbles, and will have to await the next great astroid strike for population reduction. There are some population (experts) that see disaster looming in each and every blip, but no far no dice.

Still fun to speculate about, and a good basis for scifi scenarios and stories, eh?

Carolynn

here is another article about that in the NYT.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/scien ... ef=general
what I found interesting here is that even though the CDers are less likely to fight with other males, they are more likely to defend against predators than the other males.
I think their reproductive success is proven by the fact that 40% are CDers. They, unlike humans, inherit their plumage and do not choose it. So we choose our plumage, but maybe to fit a genetically determined desire? Or maybe we can make the concious decision to sneak in with the girls by dressing like them

Anita made the comment a while ago that controlling men between the ages of 15 and 25 is a huge challenge for all societies. The army is often used for this purpose. And yes aggresive expansion seems to have worked, in fact worked so well that it is outliving it's usefulness.

The people who study these things say that overall in the last few thousand years humanity as a whole has become less violent. Which reminds me of the Biblical reading about Noah's ark, that God was disgusted with humanity because of such widespread violence. That was very specifically the sin He sent the flood in response to according to the Bible.

Back to animals. I was watching a thing about Emperor penguins the other day. Normal male behavior is for the male to incubate the egg. The female delivers the egg to the male who carries it all winter tucked up under his belly feathers for warmth. He does not eat all winter (remember this is Antartica) and after hatching he regurgitates food he has stored all winter in his stomach into the chicks mouth. THis isn't gender change, this is male behavior. At least among penguins.


Zari