San Francisco Chronicle. Sunday, June 27, 2004. Page F-1.

Nudging Darwin over the rainbow

Nature is diverse. There are gay sheep and lesbian lizards. A transgendered Stanford biologist tells all.

Katherine Seligman, Chronicle Staff Writer

It was at the annual gay pride march in San Francisco that Stanford biology professor Joan Roughgarden had her epiphany. That day in 1997, she watched men in drag, lesbians on motorcycles, gay teachers and parents, people living with AIDS, the ostentatious and the ordinary melding into one vast human mosaic stretching along Market Street.

She had come, as one among thousands, to march. After spending her first 52 years as Jonathan Roughgarden, she was about to live openly as a woman, and she wanted to walk alongside a float created by a transgender support group. But suddenly she saw the parade as more than one isolated event. As people streamed by her, they seemed to be a piece of biological evidence, proof that diversity was part of nature's plan.

"There were tens of thousands of people, and the sheer numbers alone triggered every one of my instincts as a biologist," said Roughgarden, a leading researcher in her field whose controversial new book "Evolution's Rainbow -- Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People'' (University of California Press) deals with issues that cross the wide divide from science to politics and morality. "All those people being pathologized. From a biological ecologist's point of view that is ridiculous."

So she set out to study the roles of diversity, gender and sexuality in nature, a process that would end with a challenge to a long-held Darwinian theory, to fellow scientists and politicians. Her theory, put simply, is this: Diversity of sexual behavior and gender roles, whether in the animal or human kingdoms, is not an aberration. More than 300 species of vertebrates have sex with the same gender. There are gay sheep and lesbian lizards. Some animals change gender or have more than one type of male or female. History, science, even the Bible shows us the multiplicity of human nature, she argues, although scientists have been slow to embrace this seemingly incontestable fact publicly.

"The time has come," she writes, "to take a stand, to say that we, in all our shapes and sizes, in all our gender expression, sexual orientations and body parts, are healthy."

The publication of and buzz surrounding "Evolution's Rainbow'' is why one recent afternoon we found ourselves talking about hyena genitalia while sitting in a cafe by the Embarcadero. Roughgarden had been easy to recognize because she looks just like the picture on her book jacket -- a middle-aged academic who appears younger than her 58 years, wearing a skirt, practical sandals and dangling earrings that accentuate her shoulder-length reddish- brown hair.

While doing research, she said between bites of her ahi tuna salad, she was surprised to learn about an entire species of spotted hyenas living in Tanzania in which all the females have external organs that look distinctly male. If only some of the females had them, biologists could puzzle over which did and why. But since all possessed them, she reasoned, they must serve a positive function. They were not an abnormality explained by fluctuating testosterone levels, but a way of participating in social interactions that improved survival. Living in such an aggressive society, the females use their genitals to show submission and establish themselves in a social hierarchy. "The hyena penis," she said, "legitimizes intersex architecture," illustrating that there are more ways of gender expression in nature than simply male or female.

Her book is a tour through myriad examples of diversity that, while chronicled by scientists, are little known to people who don't hang out watching lizards mate. There are species with more than one type of female or male. There are species that in harsh environments reproduce asexually to ensure survival. There are transgender animals. Male and female bluehead wrasses, a coral reef fish, look similar when young, but develop later into three genders, one of which starts and stays male, one which begins and stays female and a third which starts as female and morphs into a male. Damselfish have a gender that turns from male to female. Another fish species, hamlets, are hermaphrodites and change back and forth between genders.

Occupational gender

Gender, she said, is an expression of identity rather than biological expression. It is much like an occupation. A mechanic, for example, she said, wears a tool belt and overalls, a uniform that, over time, could change. It is an expression of identity and not the identity itself.

Many biologists have described gender diversity, Roughgarden said, but usually it is explained as an exception. Darwin's theory of sexual selection held that discerning females who choose healthy, handsome, sexually aggressive mates were most likely to succeed -- that is, to create offspring who would carry on the best genes of the species. Those who varied from the norm were misfits bound to fail.

But, Roughgarden said, there are too many deviations from the norm, too many examples of species with genders and reproductive habits that don't follow the typical description of two sexes, one consisting of "horny handsome healthy warriors" and the other "discerning damsels." Though she does not challenge Darwin's basic theory of evolution, she rejects his notion of sexual selection in favor of what she calls social selection.

"Darwin didn't bother to explain the exceptions he recognized, and as data on diversity in gender and sex continue to accumulate, sexual selection theory, which addressed only a subset of the facts to begin with, becomes increasingly inadequate," Roughgarden writes in her book.

Initially, she said, she envisioned the book as a catalog of diversity, but found herself moving beyond that. "At times I felt I wasn't even writing it," she said. "I felt like my hand was just being carried. I was just the vehicle." The book goes from an exploration of sexuality among animals to the varied sexuality of humans. Along the way, Roughgarden adds historical perspective, describing eunuchs in Roman history, early Islam and citing the Bible. Although same-sex relationships and transgendered people seem to have existed throughout history, their lives still involve prejudice and, too often, violence, she says, mentioning murders of Matthew Shepard and in the Bay Area of Gwen Araujo, whose alleged killers attacked her after discovering she was biologically a boy. A judge declared a mistrial in the Araujo case Tuesday, but prosecutors vowed to retry the defendants. Roughgarden ends the book in the political realm, after calling psychologists "medical wannabes" who have pathologized "gender and sexuality variant people" and recommending education, medical and biotechnology policies to protect and celebrate diversity. (She proposes a "Statue of Diversity" be constructed in San Francisco's harbor.)

The only subject left out is her own transgender experience. "I'm not writing a memoir," she said. "That's been done by plenty of others. I'll leave that to them." She would only say of her transition to life as a woman that she could never manage "to do the guy thing."

"Just think if you tried now to go over and try and be one of the guys here," she said. "Do you think you could do that?"

Roughgarden spent her earliest years in Indonesia, where her father did missionary work as an engineer. The family then moved to the Philippines, where he worked for the United Nations. Perhaps, she said, it was her love of the lush environs there that led to her interest in biology.

"I so loved the tropics," she said. "The bats flew like starlings and you'd hear them around you. There was a fabulous diversity of shape and color." She, her parents and brother moved to New Jersey just before junior high school and stayed there until she went to college at University of Rochester. She had thought of being a premed student but changed her mind before freshman classes began.

"I never thought inside the box, from day one," she said. "Maybe growing up in really foreign cultures, you have to see into other ways of life. It's possible that prepared me for seeing the intelligence of (an) animal's social life."

She earned her doctorate at Harvard, where she studied theoretical ecology, using mathematical models to study animal population dynamics. She joined the biology department at Stanford in 1972 and has written two other books, the most recent one on Anolis lizards of the Caribbean, and co-written two additional ones.

Despite her professional success, academia poses challenges for nonconformists like her, she said. "It's still an issue," she said of her transition to living as a woman. "Even at Stanford, it's a huge issue. If you're not like them, they can't get a read of you."

Difficult transition

Though she shied away from discussing the transition during our discussion, in a 2001 interview with Gender Talk Web-Radio, she conceded that it was a difficult time for her. She recalled how nervous she was sitting in a church at Stanford as she waited for an appointment to tell her plans to then- Provost Condoleezza Rice. Rice listened to Roughgarden's plans, looked at a picture of her dressed as a woman and told her she could remain, commenting, according to another report, that she made a "beautiful woman."

Roughgarden took a sabbatical in Santa Barbara to complete her physical transition and then moved to San Francisco. In 2000, partly to meet new people and forge what she thought might be a new career in politics, she ran for county supervisor. She spent less than $1,000 and ended up in the middle of 17 candidates with 2.5 percent of the vote. Not a landslide victory, but enough to show her she could make a career change, if necessary.

But her fears of rejection in her profession, even of endangering the environmental movement in which she was active, did not materialize. Instead, as word filtered down, she found support from many of her peers. "Among my colleagues it's been phenomenal," she said in the radio interview. "I discovered such goodness I didn't know was there."

Their reactions to her book, she said at the cafe, "is a developing story. " The book warns about the danger of genetic engineering -- cloning, the Human Genome Project -- saying they are a threat to our species. But the bulk of the work focuses on the evidence of sexual and gender diversity.

"Almost everyone thinks we should be having this discussion," she said. "But most biologists think Darwin can be fixed up. They think he will be confirmed. ... What we'll be seeing is a whole pile of new suggestions coming up."

As the reactions begin to roll in -- a book review in the influential journal Science, for example, said she had used revised biological theories to embrace and explain sexual diversity but had failed to revolutionize them -- she is concentrating on her work. This summer she will accompany a graduate student to study lizards on the Caribbean island of Bequia.

But she still envisions a day when kids can go into a Discovery Store and buy a gay dinosaur or see an exhibit on animal homosexuality at the zoo. She concedes that is probably long in the future. The California Academy of Sciences has no plans yet to create such an exhibit, but director of research David Kavanaugh says it is "definitely a possibility." "It could well be controversial," he said, "but it might be an opportunity to present what we know scientifically about something that is pretty widespread in nature."

If that is too far in the future, so is the day when she can just go somewhere and be Joan Roughgarden, person, and not a transgendered individual who feels society's judgmental eyes.

"With gay, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders still losing jobs, still having a cement ceiling and having to worry about our physical safety," she said, "the day when being transgendered will be as unremarkable as your hair color, that's not a vision I can easily entertain."

E-mail Katherine Seligman at kseligman@sfchronicle.com.

Š2004 San Francisco Chronicle