Pheasants are ‘queer’ birds of a different feather, claims museum

Species is able to change sex, says Hastings guide produced to chart the town’s pink history

PHEASANTS are “queer”, according to an LGBT history guide for museum visitors.

The guide states that the birds are “queer” because they “change their sex from female to male”, despite the claim being scientifically unfounded.

Visitors to the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery are also informed that the LGBT behaviour of animals has been historically “hidden from the public”.

The “queerness” of game birds and other animals undermines arguments that any “queer” behaviour is “unnatural”, according to a guide published by the Hastings Queer History Collective, which is supported by Arts Council England.

Its pamphlet, produced with the help of a local graphic design studio, steers visitors around the “pink history” of the seaside town and its museum collections.

It highlights a pair of taxidermied pheasants held in the council-owned Hastings Museum and Art Gallery.

“Despite queer behaviour in the animal kingdom being observed as far back as the 18th century, it is often ignored or hidden from the public,” it says. “One example is of female pheasants changing their sex when they stop laying eggs and turn their brown feathers into the brightly coloured feathering typical of males.

“Pheasants feature in some of the earliest European studies of queer behaviour in animals.” It adds: “With queerness visible in the natural world, the argument that it is somehow ‘unnatural’ begins to unravel.”

The guide – a Queer History Trail

Map – cites a work by an 18th-century ornithologist, John Hunter, who wrote an account of pheasants switching sex.

Research into female pheasants changing plumage has found they do not “change sex”, but produce male feathering owing to a hormonal imbalance caused by damaged ovaries. This has also been observed in chickens.

Dr Emma Hilton, a development biologist and board director of the gender-critical campaign group Sex Matters, said the claims about pheasants were “nonsense”.

“The only vertebrates that change sex are all fish. Birds do not change sex,” she said. “Often in the process of ageing, female animals can produce male features as a result of hormonal changes, we can also see this in humans following the menopause, but we would not say that older women had changed sex if they have a bit of a moustache. These kinds of claims can be very wearying.”

The guide also maintains that “18th-century colonialism is responsible for the destruction of many ancient gender systems in countries around the world”.

Hastings borough council has been contacted for comment.