FOREST EUPHORIA

The science behind nature’s diverse biology.

Mycologist Kaishian’s erudite interpretation of the queerness of biology is filled with intriguing facts and lessons about the natural world. It’s also made personal with generous anecdotes braided in from the author’s own history and identity struggles as a youth experiencing gender dysphoria, as well as an ordeal of sexual trauma and adult ADHD. Growing up on the eastern border of New York state, Kaishian was “unafraid of the organisms around me” and connected early on to various snake species in her backyard; their habitats and the surrounding forests and swamps became her euphoric refuge throughout a childhood fraught with ambiguous orientation. As she came to better understand her own queer self, her personalized interest in the queerness and biodiversity of biology and ecology grew into her life’s passion. Framing her scientific exploration on the globe’s vast microcosmos of creatures around her existence as a queer person, Kaishian illuminates the diversity of nature with studies on ambiguously sexed, magnetic-sensing eels or slipper snails, which all start out male, then form a pile and remain male or transition to female; the cassowary, a large, flightless species of bird relative to the ostrich, possessing intersexed reproductive organs; and the microbiomes unique to each human body, which the author dubs “ancient communal swamps.” Whether it be the same-sex affiliations of bowerbirds, the lifestyles of crows, or the interminable sexes of fungi, the author enthusiastically brings these species to vibrant life with a bevy of fascinating facts. With immense knowledge, grace, experience, and lyrical prose (a description of her ritualistic consumption of psychedelic mushrooms is particularly vivid), Kaishian persuades us that there is never just one way for living things in the natural world to reproduce or evolve or interact and that greater, more diversified ecological possibilities beautifully coexist.

A celebratory appreciation of the ubiquity of queerness in the natural world.