# A Little Queer Natural History

**Author:** Josh L. Davis  
**Save to Your Books:**  
[Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/a/8007/9780226837031)  
[Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226837033?tag=tattooedbib01-20)

Beautifully illustrated and scientifically informed, a celebration of the astonishing diversity of sexual behavior and biology found in nature.

From a pair of male swans raising young to splitgill mushrooms with over 23,000 mating types, sex in the natural world is wonderfully diverse. Josh L. Davis considers how, for many different organisms—animals, plants, and fungi included—sexual reproduction and sex determination rely on a surprisingly complex interaction among genes, hormones, environment, and chance.

As Davis introduces us to fascinating biological concepts like parthenogenesis (virgin birth), monoecious plants (individuals with separate male and female flowers), and sex-reversed genitals, we see turtle hatchlings whose sex is determined by egg temperature; butterflies that embody male and female biological tissue in the same organism; and a tomato that can reproduce three different ways at the same time.

Davis also reveals animal and plant behaviors in nature that researchers have historically covered up or explained away, like queer sex among Adélie penguins or bottlenose dolphins, and presents animal behaviors that challenge us to rethink our assumptions and prejudices.

Featuring fabulous sex-fluid fishes and ant, wasp, and bee queens who can choose both how they want to have sex and the sex of their offspring, *A Little Queer Natural History* offers a larger lesson: that the diversity we see in our own species needs no justification and represents just a fraction of what exists in the natural world.

---

## Recommendations by Theme

### SYSTEMIC RACISM
- **Fiction:**  
  - *Legendborn* by Tracy Deonn  
  - *Blood at the Root* by LaDarrion Williams  
- **Non-Fiction:**  
  - *Between the World and Me* by Ta-Nehisi Coates  
  - *Letter from Birmingham Jail* by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

### IMMIGRATION
- **Fiction:**  
  - *Automatic Noodle* by Annalee Newitz  
- **Non-Fiction:**  
  - *They Called Us Enemy* by George Takei

### COLONIZATION
- **Fiction:**  
  - *Cry, Voidbringer* by Elaine Ho  
  - *This Place: 150 Years Retold*  
- **Non-Fiction:**  
  - *Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States: A Graphic Interpretation* by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

### LGBTQIA+ EXPERIENCE
- **Fiction:**  
  - *No Gods, No Monsters* by Cadwell Turnbull  
  - *Hell Followed With Us* by Andrew Joseph White  
- **Non-Fiction:**  
  - *A Little Queer Natural History* by Josh L. Davis  
  - *Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender* by Kit Heyam

### PRISON ABOLITION
- **Fiction:**  
  - *Chain-Gang All-Stars* by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah  
- **Non-Fiction:**  
  - *Abolitionist Intimacies* by El Jones

### DISABILITY
- **Fiction:**  
  - *Cinder* by Marissa Meyer  
- **Non-Fiction:**  
  - *Grievers* by adrienne marie brown

---

For additional recommendations sorted by social justice topics:
[AK Press](https://www.akpress.org/books.html)  
What other subjects would you like recommendations for? Feel free to leave me some recs!