Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

Kaishian, a mycology curator at the New York State Museum, debuts with reverent celebration of the natural world’s diversity. Highlighting “queer” animals, fungi, and plants that complicate “our ideas of what is ‘normal’ versus what is ‘deviant,’ ” Kaishian contends that cassowaries, a type of flightless bird, upend sexual binaries because both males and females have phalluses. She explains that eels are intersex until their final year of life, when they “stop eating and structurally repurpose their digestive organs” into testes and ovaries, and that all slipper snails start out as males until one day they pile on top of one another, at which point some switch sexes depending on their position in the mound. Elsewhere, Kaishian reflects on how nature has informed her understanding of her own queerness. For instance, she describes how she was initially drawn to study fungi because she saw the ambiguity of her gender identity reflected in the numerous mating types found in most species (the Schizophyllum commune has more than 23,000 “sexes”). Fascinating tidbits abound, and the lyrical prose imbues the scientific discussions with a sense of wonder (she describes how each spring in forests east of the Mississippi River, “the understory fills with sweet lures—trillium, violets, mayflower, bloodroot—love potions for pollinators, themselves shuddering into awareness”). This will leave readers in awe of nature’s many splendors. (May)