Intersex is not a woke construct

While intersex animals are often infertile and unable to produce offspring to help a population grow, Beans Velocci, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the history of sex classification, says that in social species such as whales, intersex animals likely play important nonreproductive roles that benefit the population in other ways.

Studying intersex animals has helped scientists better understand how genes and hormones shape individuals as they develop. Through the process of domesticating livestock, people have known about intersex cows for thousands of years. On Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, islanders nurture a unique strain of intersex pigs prized for their delicate spiraling tusks.

More recently, researchers have also documented intersex horses, dogs, moose, sheep, fish, and many different types of invertebrates. Intersex animals are rare across species but they’re “more common than we historically thought,” says Carla Crossman, a graduate student at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.