New research reveals how stormy conditions affect albatrosses’ ability to feed

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Liverpool

 

image: 

Wandering albatross flying over relatively calm seas

view more 

Credit: Dr Samantha Patrick, University of Liverpool

Albatrosses are exceptionally mobile and use the wind to travel hundreds of thousands of miles to feed on squid, fish, or other animals found near the water surface in the open ocean.

In fact, some larger species of albatrosses are so reliant on the wind that they struggle to even take off when the conditions are calm.

Now, a new international study led by researchers from the University of Liverpool’s School of Environmental Science, reveals that that there is an upper limit to the wind’s benefit.

In a paper published in the journal Current Biology, researchers find that despite being masterful fliers, two species of albatrosses struggled to eat during very stormy weather conditions which made finding food difficult or dangerous.

The research team analysed data collected at South Georgia in the southwest Atlantic Ocean. Using small tracking devices attached by researchers from the British Antarctic Survey, the team were able to measure when and where birds were resting, flying or eating. In addition, they used satellite measurements of wind, rain and water clarity to see when birds encountered stormy conditions.

Jamie Darby, lead author of the paper while at University of Liverpool and now based at the University College Cork, said: “This combination of data is a very powerful tool for understanding how albatrosses behave, especially when they are so difficult to observe directly.”

“On several occasions, we tracked wandering albatross flying in very strong storm winds. During these times, the logger data tell us that the albatrosses barely fed at all. Not only did they not manage to eat, but they also landed and took off more regularly.”

Dr Ewan Wakefield from Durham University, a coauthor on the study, explained this phenomenon: “The albatrosses seem to avoid severe winds by landing on the water, but then cannot rest for long, probably because such strong wind would cause waves to break over them regularly.”

Wandering albatrosses have the largest wingspan of any bird, up to 3.4m, adapted for efficient flight in Southern Ocean winds. Because of this adaptation, albatrosses have not been considered at risk from storms, which are predicted to become more frequent and severe in the Southern Ocean due to climate change. Recent research has questioned this assumption, showing several examples of albatrosses avoiding the strongest wind in storm systems.

University of Liverpool ecologist Dr Samantha Patrick, who is principal investigator of the project, added: “This study allows us to understand animal behaviour when they are in places and conditions that make it almost impossible for us to see them directly. This includes extreme weather, like Southern Ocean storms. Knowing what animals do in these conditions, and how they cope, is really important. It’s a way to figure out how they will be affected by changes in their environment.”

This new research shows that even these wind-adapted albatrosses might be disadvantaged by more widespread extreme winds, as they are more likely to encounter conditions that make finding food difficult or dangerous.

The paper `Strong winds reduce foraging success in albatrosses‘ (doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.018) is published in the journal Current Biology.

The international research team was led by the University of Liverpool and involved British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), University of Coimbra, and Durham University.

This research was funded by the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) in the UK and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US.

Black-browed albatross in flight near Crozet Islands

Credit

Dr Samantha Patrick, University of Liverpool

 

---

Journal

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.018 

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Strong winds reduce foraging success in albatrosses

Article Publication Date

1-Nov-2024

 PALEONTOLOGY

Archaic dolphin could hear high frequency sounds

Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns

 

image: 

Fossil dolphin Romaleodelphis pollerspoecki

view more 

Credit: M. Schellenberger, SNSB-BSPG

The shallow inland sea in which the newly described dolphin lived some 22 million years ago together with many other organisms, including a variety of microorganisms, algae, snails, mussels, relatives of squid, and fishes, stretched north of the just emerging Alps. The only fossil known of this dolphin to date comes from a site near Linz in Upper Austria. It was assigned to a new, previously unknown species and genus, and scientifically named Romaleodelphis pollerspoecki by researchers from the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Geology (SNSB-BSPG) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, as well as the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt.

"All that remains of Romaleodelphis pollerspoecki is its fragmented and incomplete skull with an elongated snout and 102 uniform teeth" reports first author Catalina Sánchez Posada who examined the fossil as part of her master's thesis. The animal belongs to the toothed whales, but differs significantly from all previously known prehistoric representatives of this lineage. Comparisons and a complex computer-based analysis of the relationships to other fossil dolphins revealed that Romaleodelphis was probably related to the already extinct, very archaic dolphins of the so-called Chilcacetus clade. "All previously known fossils of this dolphin lineage come from the north-eastern Pacific and the coasts of South America. The discovery of Romaleodelphis pollerspoecki, a putative European relative of this lineage, could therefore provide important new insights into the origin and evolution of the lineage in the earliest Miocene," says PD Dr. Gertrud Rößner, curator of fossil mammals from the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Geology, senior author of the study.

The fossil of the skull is severely compressed and distorted, which made the examination of the skull anatomy particularly challenging. Computed tomography images taken at the Department of Radiology at the Ludwig Maximilians University Hospital in Munich made it possible to examine and reconstruct internal features.

The anatomical reconstruction of the fossil's inner ear using micro-computed tomography images also yielded astonishing results. "The shape of the well-preserved bony labyrinth in the skull indicates that Romaleodelphis pollerspoecki was able to hear high-frequency signals," explains co-author Dr. Rachel Racicot from Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum. This makes this dolphin one of the oldest known toothed whales that already had a similarly developed sense of hearing as modern porpoises, for example. These animals are able to communicate in frequency ranges that are beyond the hearing range of their predators. There may also be a connection in the development with the ability of orientation through echolocation, which is typical for dolphins.

The dolphin fossil was unearthed in 1980 by the private collector Jürgen Pollerspöck, who later gave it to the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Geology for restoration and proper storage. The study has now been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

---

Fossil dolphin Romaleodelphis pollerspoecki. View from above

Caption

Fossil dolphin Romaleodelphis pollerspoecki. Lateral view

Credit

Manuela Schellenberger, SNSB-BSPG

The skull of Romaleodelphis pollerspoecki in the CT of the Clinic and Polyclinic for Radiology at the LMU Munich Hospital

Credit

Catalina Sánchez Posada

Journal

Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

DOI

10.1080/02724634.2024.2401503 

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Romaleodelphis pollerspoecki, gen. et sp. nov., an archaic dolphin from the Central Paratethys (Early Miocene, Austria)

Article Publication Date

5-Nov-2024

Fossil of huge terror bird offers new information about wildlife in South America 12 million years ago

Johns Hopkins Medicine

 

image: 

The end of a terror bird’s left tibiotarsus, a lower leg bone in birds equivalent to that of a human tibia or shin bone, dates back to the Miocene epoch around 12 million years ago.

view more 

Credit: Degrange et al.

Researchers including a Johns Hopkins University evolutionary biologist report they have analyzed a fossil of an extinct giant meat-eating bird — which they say could be the largest known member of its kind — providing new information about animal life in northern South America millions of years ago.

The evidence lies in the leg bone of the terror bird described in new paper published Nov. 4 in Palaeontology. The study was led by Federico J. Degrange, a terror bird specialist, and included Siobhán Cooke, Ph.D., associate professor of functional anatomy and evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The bone, found in the fossil-rich Tatacoa Desert in Colombia, which sits at the northern tip of South America, is believed to be the northernmost evidence of the bird in South America thus far.

The size of the bone also indicates that this terror bird may be the largest known member of the species identified to date, approximately 5%–20% larger than known Phorusrhacids, Cooke says. Previously discovered fossils indicate that terror bird species ranged in size from 3 feet to 9 feet tall.

“Terror birds lived on the ground, had limbs adapted for running, and mostly ate other animals,” Cooke says.

The bird’s leg bone was found by Cesar Augusto Perdomo, curator of the Museo La Tormenta, nearly 20 years ago, but was not recognized as a terror bird until 2023. In January 2024, researchers created a three-dimensional virtual model of the specimen using a portable scanner from Johns Hopkins Medicine, allowing them to analyze it further.

The fossil, the end of a left tibiotarsus, a lower leg bone in birds equivalent to that of a human tibia or shin bone, dates back to the Miocene epoch around 12 million years ago. The bone, with deep pits unique to the legs of all Phorusrhacids, is also marked with probable teeth marks of an extinct caiman — Purussaurus — a species that is thought to have been up to 30 feet long, Cooke says.

“We suspect that the terror bird would have died as a result of its injuries given the size of crocodilians 12 million years ago,” she says.  

Most terror bird fossils have been identified in the southern part of South America, including Argentina and Uruguay.

The Phorusrhacid fossil discovery as far north as Colombia suggests that it was an important part of predatory wildlife in the region. Importantly, this fossil helps the researchers better understand the animals living in the region 12 million years ago. Now a desert, scientists believe this region was once an environment full of meandering rivers. This giant bird lived among primates, hoofed mammals, giant ground sloths and armadillo relatives, glyptodonts, that were the size of cars. Today, the seriema, a long-legged bird native to South America that stands up to 3-feet-tall, is thought to be a modern relative of Phorusrhacid.

“It’s a different kind of ecosystem than we see today or in other parts of the world during a period before South and North America were connected,” Cooke says

Believed to be the first of its kind from the site, the fossil indicates that the species would have been relatively uncommon among the animals there 12 million years ago, Cooke says.

 “It’s possible there are fossils in existing collections that haven’t been recognized yet as terror birds because the bones are less diagnostic than the lower leg bone we found,” she says.

For Cooke, the finding helps her imagine an environment one can no longer find in nature.

“It would have been a fascinating place to walk around and see all of these now extinct animals,” she says.

In addition to Cooke and Perdomo, the study’s authors include first author Federico Javier Degrange of Centro de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Tierra; Luis G. Ortiz-Pabon of Universidad de Los Andes, Carrera, Bogotá, Colombia and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Carrera, Bogotá; Jonathan Pelegrin of Universidad del Valle, Colombia, and Universidad Santiago de Cali, Colombia; Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi of Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Avenida Arenales, Perú; and Andrés Link of Universidad de Los Andes, Carrera Bogotá, Colombia. 

DOI: doi.org/10.1002/spp2.1601

---

Journal

Palaeontology

Reconstructing plesiosaur swimming styles with bio-mimetic control

Tohoku University

 

image: 

The plesiosaur-like robot that uses the bio-inspired control system.

view more 

Credit: Akira Fukuhara

A research group may have unraveled the mystery behind the locomotion of the ancient marine reptile, the plesiosaur, by recreating a bio-inspired control system that accounts for motion adjustment.

Extinct animals have vastly different body shapes from animals still around today, making it difficult to determine how they moved by comparing them to living species. Additionally, fossils rarely preserve the soft limb tissues that scientists need to study locomotion and gain key insights into their lifestyles.

Plesiosaurs roamed Earth's prehistoric oceans, propelled by their unique body structure, which featured four large, equally sized flippers. Yet how plesiosaurs used these flippers to swim has long baffled paleontologists. This so-called 'four-wing problem' has been a topic of heated debate for years.

But now, a research group comprising researchers from Tohoku University, Kanagawa University, and the University of Manchester has developed a novel approach to tackle this mystery.

"Instead of focusing solely on how water interacts with plesiosaur bodies - that is, the hydrodynamics of swimming - we decided to examine how these animals controlled their movement," says Akio Ishiguro, a professor at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication (RIEC) at Tohoku University. "This is because plesiosaurs must have been able to swim at different speeds and in varied conditions."

Akio and his colleagues drew inspiration from inter-limb coordination mechanics underlying the flexible gait patterns used by other four-legged vertebrates, such as dogs and cats. They developed an autonomous decentralized control system for a plesiosaur-like robot.

Experimental results showed that the control system successfully generated coordinated patterns between the fore and hind flippers in response to changes in the flapping cycle and morphology.

"Our new approach reconstructs the way extinct animals can adjust their movement patterns in a flexible, situation-dependent manner," says Akira Fukuhara, an assistant professor at RIEC and the lead/first author of the paper. "It also means we can start investigating the complete locomotion repertoires of other extinct animals and learn more about their lifestyles."

Details of the finding were published in the journal Scientific Reports on October 28, 2024.

Also involved in the study were Mtsutoshi Sato and Hisayuki Ogawa, two former graduate students from RIEC; along with Tamaki Sato, a professor at Kanagawa University; and William Sellers, a professor at the University of Manchester.

Looking ahead, the research group hopes to make motion reconstructions that factor in other aspects of plesiosaur bodies. "Plesiosaurs notoriously possessed elongated necks, but these lengths varied considerably from creature to creature," adds Ishiguro. "We hope to create models that incorporate the roles of the neck, head, and torso in controlling these ancient creatures' movements."

A plesiosaur with a unique morphology. Modern animals that swim using their fins propel themselves using their front fins, but plesiosaurs have very large front and hind fins, and it is thought that they could use both to propel themselves. The problem of the coordination of the limbs of plesiosaurs is discussed as the 'four-wing problem,' and it is one of the long-standing movement reconstruction issues in paleontology. 

Credit

Akira Fukuhara

---

Journal

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-024-55805-z 

Article Title

Rethinking the four-wing problem in plesiosaur swimming using bio-inspired decentralized control

Sea angels and devils: could plankton unlock the secrets of human biology?

Brianna Randall
Tue 5 November 2024 
THE GUARDIAN

Different plankton found off Greenland and California, including Sapphirina and an unidentified siphonophore species related to hydrozoan jellies.Photograph: Leonid Moroz/University of Florida

Off the west coast of Greenland, a 17-metre (56ft) aluminium sailing boat creeps through a narrow, rocky fjord in the Arctic twilight. The research team onboard, still bleary-eyed from the rough nine-day passage across the Labrador Sea, lower nets to collect plankton. This is the first time anyone has sequenced the DNA of the tiny marine creatures that live here.

Watching the nets with palpable excitement is Prof Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida’s Whitney marine lab. “This is what the world looked like when life began,” he tells his friend, Peter Molnar, the expedition leader with whom he co-founded the Ocean Genome Atlas Project (Ogap).

Moroz gestures toward Greenland’s glaciated valleys. The rapid warming here is replicating conditions from 600m years ago, when complex life forms began appearing. “We’re sailing through deep biological time right now,” he says.

Moroz and Molnar’s mission is to classify, observe, sequence and map 80% of the sea’s smallest creatures to learn more about ourselves, and the health of the planet.

Plankton and humans do not have much in common at first glance. But studying marine organisms has led to breakthrough understandings about our own brains and bodies. Observing the electrical discharges of jellyfish taught us how to restart the heart. Sea slugs showed us how memories form. Squid taught us how signals spread between different parts of the brain. Horseshoe crabs demonstrated how visual receptors work.

An unusual aspect of Moroz and Molnar’s research trips is that they are unlocking plankton’s secrets onboard sailing boats rather than engine-powered vessels – and they are not alone in this endeavour.

“Large oceanographic vessels can cost $100,000 [£77,000] a day, which can quickly bankrupt your research organisation,” says Chris Bowler, an oceanographer with France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and a scientific adviser to the Tara Ocean Foundation.

For the past two years he has collected plankton samples for the Microbiomes Mission, a research initiative to study micro-organisms in the ocean, onboard a 33-metre schooner. “Working from a sailboat is 50 times cheaper,” Bowler says.

That cost saving also allows researchers the luxury of time, which is imperative for finding the genetic commonalities and patterns that will reveal answers about human health. Bowler says it is important to analyse and observe these microscopic organisms interacting with each other and the world around them. That cannot happen in a lab back on land because the organisms are too fragile.

Low-carbon, readily available and easier to manoeuvre near to shore, sailing boats also “don’t vibrate, so you can do really precise work aboard”, says Molnar, who has captained Ogap voyages over more than 9,000 nautical miles.

The reason that microscopic marine life can teach us about our own development is convergent evolution. This is when unrelated organisms arrive at the same solution to a problem, such as how birds, beetles, butterflies and bats all adapted to fly, but did so at different times and in slightly different ways. Overlapping solutions provide common building blocks for everything from how to fold a protein to how to form a brain.

“Every organism that lives here today is a logbook of every single adaptation that made it successful,” Moroz says. “The brain is one of the most complicated structures in the universe. Yet 70% of our knowledge about how the brain works is thanks to marine creatures. Without them, many of today’s medicines would simply not exist.”



The brain is one of the universe’s most complicated structures. Yet 70% of our knowledge about how it works is thanks to marine creatures

Leonid Moroz

The reason he studies plankton is because their “logbook” is the longest – some single-celled marine organisms have been around for more than 3bn years. That means they have more tricks up their metaphorical sleeves than we do.

“Some groups of these marine species do not age, never develop cancers and they can fully regenerate when damaged. They are able to perform many tasks better than us,” Moroz says.

One way to take human medicine to the next level is to take our cues from these organisms. But first, we have to identify them. Ogap’s lofty mission would not have been possible 10 years ago; rapid technological advances have reduced the size of equipment, while satellite communications and AI have shrunk the timeframe for analysing results from months to minutes.

In Greenland, for example, Ogap kept marine organisms alive for several days on their sailing boat while sequencing their DNA during different stages of life. “We were able to watch them reproduce, decay, then repair themselves, even die, all while taking high-resolution video,” Molnar says.

The team then uploaded the data via Starlink to universities where scientists used AI to look for pattern recognition in the organisms’ DNA. “Literally within an hour, we would have results back on the sailboat,” Molnar says. “This type of work was simply science fiction 10 years ago.”

While the technology is new, using sailing boats to explore is a millennia-old human endeavour.

“There’s a long history of sailing to answer scientific questions,” says David Conover, the owner of ArcticEarth, the sailing boat Ogap used for its Greenland expedition. From Captain Cook’s anthropological discoveries in the Pacific to Darwin’s groundbreaking observations on natural selection onboard the Beagle, sailing boats have afforded many types of researchers the luxury of getting to far-flung parts of the world to deeply engage with their surroundings.

“The more time you can afford to be at sea, the more open you are to discovery,” Conover says.

Related: ‘A huge loss’: is it the end for the ship that helped us understand life on Earth?

The key now is to observe the cornucopia of unknown marine organisms before they disappear for ever. “By the time you finish your coffee tomorrow morning, between 20 and 100 species will have vanished for ever, including the wonderful solutions they were offered by nature, which is a huge loss for biomedical science,” Moroz says.

To continue documenting the wonders of tiny single-celled sea creatures, Ogap will head next to Patagonia, at the tip of South America. Eventually, Ogap’s genomic atlas will be digitised and made freely available, providing a baseline of marine biodiversity as well as valuable insights for the development of new medicines.

“Every day is a surprise,” Moroz says. “That is the finest part of all of these voyages – the level of excitement, of discovery. It’s so rich. It’s nonstop.”

A Memoir of Transitioning

Ben Terrall

 November 4, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Image by Katie Rainbow.

The best writers are worth reading, no matter their subject matter. The wildly talented, idiosyncratic, and erudite Lucy Sante is a case in point. Sante is a versatile wordsmith who has appeared in the New York Review of Books for decades, been the film critic for Interview, the book critic for New York, the photography critic for The New Republic, and has been published in countless “little magazines” including The Threepenny Review. She even won a Grammy for some of her liner notes. I’ve been a fan since reading Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, her deeply researched history of crime and the hard lives of the poor in lower Manhattan in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, shortly after it came out in 1991.

Sante’s latest work, I Heard Her Call My Name, is a memoir of transitioning from Luc, the male name under which she functioned until her mid-sixties, to Lucy. Par for the course with Sante, the writing is sublime, filled with artful turns of phrase and droll asides. Though Sante’s The Factory of Facts (1998) was also a memoir of sorts, that earlier work played its cards close to the vest on the personal front. It includes the memorable line, “I had no illusions about genealogy, a pathetic hobby that combined the bold passion of stamp collecting with the modest sobriety of medieval reenactments,” but large chunks of the book dig into the history of the author’s rural Belgian forebears with a level of family tree forensics which seems at least partly a convenient avoidance of self-disclosure. It provides no hint of the gender dysphoria that Sante now recalls being a lifelong struggle.

I Heard Her Call My Name, on the other hand, delves deep into the gender confusion that Sante describes actively suppressing well into her sixties. Chapters on the period leading up to and including her gender transition alternate with sections on earlier parts of her life, from childhood in Belgium and New Jersey through wild times in Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s.

Sante participated in the first-wave NYC punk and renegade arts scenes, running around with artistically inclined movers and shakers, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jim Jarmusch, Sara Driver, and Darryl Pinkney. Her descriptions of the cash-strapped but creatively fecund milieus in and around what became known as Alphabet City are alone worth the book’s cover price. One choice passage: “All of us were performing all the time. It was what we had come to New York City to do. Every single person under forty walking down Saint Mark’s Place between Second and Third was acting in a movie only they could see. Band of Outsiders, Expresso Bongo, Ashes and Diamonds, Cruel Story of Youth, Baby Doll, Shock Corridor, Lonesome Cowboys, Night of the Living Dead. Sometimes you could just about call out the name of the picture when you saw them walk by.” (Her stellar collections of essays and experimental pieces, Kill All Your Darlings and Maybe The People Would Be The Times, are packed with great stuff on Sante’s friends, inspirations, and obsessions from that era.)

As the Eighties slogged on, the ascendance of finance, insurance, and real estate profiteers squeezed out bohemians from their formerly cheap digs, decimating the world that helped shape Sante’s esthetic orientation. In that progressively more gloomy decade, Sante writes, “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in the present sociopathic moral culture” and “we ate at restaurants where you were served seven squid-ink ravioli on a plate the size of a bicycle wheel.”

Despite displaying a slothful work ethic at her early ’80s New York Review of Books mailroom job, Sante was snagged by the highly-esteemed Review editor Barbara Epstein to be her assistant. Epstein must have noticed how well-read Sante was; her new employee was a lifelong autodidact who had immersed herself in broad reading of classic European and other literature. Sante closely studied Epstein’s sharply-honed editorial skills. Having Epstein school her in revising and improving essays helped Sante find her own distinctive voice. The New York Review of Books accepted the first piece Sante submitted to them, on Albert Goldman’s trashy biography of Elvis Presley. She took on a wide range of topics for paid writing assignments, including portraits of individual writers, artists, and musicians, cultural tendencies, and such offbeat history as the heyday of “spirit photography,” which purported to catch images of ghosts.

Sante describes an old romantic partner as having “a keen sense of the quackeries of language.” That fabulous compliment also applies to Sante, whose work embraces the esoteric and the eccentric, recovering and relishing forgotten slang and colloquialisms from previous eras and subcultures; Peter Schjeldahl, the late art critic for The New Yorker, aptly described her as “one of the handful of living masters of the American language.”

To Sante’s credit, she avoids misty-eyed sentimentality when drawing from the past: in her book Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 (2009), she describes nostalgia as “the term Americans use for the bargain they strike between ignorance of the past and discomfort with the present.”

Affection and identification with women runs throughout I Heard Her Call My Name. A bohemian aesthete, very much drawn to fashion, Sante writes that as she eased into her identity as a newly-emerging woman in 2021, “I felt fortunate to have my friends: tough, stylish, independent-minded women, some of whom I’d known for over forty years and had seen evolve, who now weren’t kids anymore but were not in any way backing down. I modeled my attitude on theirs, and studied their style.” Sante exults over female role models in the wider world as well, listing a wonderfully eclectic mix which includes Eartha Kitt, Poly Styrene, Thelma Ritter, Emma Goldman, Anna Mae Wong, Memphis Minnie, Gloria Grahame, Dorothy Day, Helen Levitt, and Billie Holiday. Just to balance things out, “I inhabited Angie Dickinson as Police Woman.”

I Heard Her Call My Name clearly depicts the daunting process of transitioning to a freer, more fully realized life as Lucy, and coming out to family, friends, and acquaintances. Clocking in at 226 pages, a manageable length for even the most internet-damaged attention spans, the book includes a generous selection of photographs from Sante’s life. These include Sante head shots treated with the gender swapping feature of something called Face-App, which transformed old photos into images of the writer’s truer female self.

In describing the emotional terrain and practical realities of emerging as a woman, Sante’s honesty and attention to particulars keep her narrative free of strident polemics or grandstanding. Sante describes herself as a trans writer, rather than a trans writer. She writes, “I’m allergic to theory and even more to the kind of shibboleth retoric (and its principal by-product, a defensive posture) that pervades much — though by no means all — of trans writing. […] I don’t wish to be a spokesperson, although I accept that by writing this book I will have become just that.”

In this age of billionaire-backed fascists using weaponized transphobia to divide and conquer, I Heard Her Call My Name could hardly be timelier. The book inspires empathy and solidarity through its nuanced, powerful, and accessible account of Sante’s transformation from Luc to Lucy. Sante concludes, “I certainly hope that my story will be read by people who need to see that gender dysphoria, expressed in childhood or adolescence, is not a passing fancy that will evaporate when the social climate changes.” So do I.

Ben Terrall is a writer living in the Bay Area. He can be reached at: bterrall@gmail.com

The Republicans Are Attacking Trans People.

 Why Aren’t the Democrats Talking About It?

In this election, Republicans are attacking trans people while Democrats have backed away from the issue.

Sybil Davis November 4, 2024

LEFT VOICE USA



“Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports” the disembodied voice in the Trump ad says, oozing contempt. The voice goes on, driving toward the central slogan: “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for you.” Anti-trans ads are blanketing the country: in October roughly 41 percent of pro-Trump ads were anti-trans ads. This number shouldn’t be surprising — after all, the new Republican Party is built in large part on anti-trans politics. Outside of Trump, over 100 Republican candidates are running on an anti-trans platform. This is coming after a multi-year offensive against trans rights from Republicans at the state level which has left trans rights severely limited in over half the country. Trump has long made anti-trans attacks part of his campaign and is making them a central part of his closing message to voters. At his horrific Madison Square Garden Rally, Trump declared that “We will get … transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports.” His rally speeches frequently feature the bizarre lie that young people are getting gender affirming surgeries in school — how exactly that would work is unclear, do the schools all have a secret surgical bay?

To put it bluntly, as a trans woman, it’s a scary time. The level of demagoguery that has been employed against trans people — especially trans women and trans youth — has reached a fever pitch over the last few years making things even more unsafe for trans people, especially trans women of color.

But one of the things that makes this all scarier is the way the national Democratic Party has backed away from defending trans people. And, despite what the Trump campaign wants you to believe, that definitely includes Kamala Harris.

Harris has been largely quiet about trans issues throughout the campaign. When she has spoken about them, it’s been worryingly non-committal: she will “follow the law” when it comes to things like gender affirming care for minors and gender affirming surgeries for incarcerated people. Out of context, this may not sound so bad. But within context, it’s horrifying. There are anti-trans laws in more than half the country that restrict the bodily autonomy of trans youth and, in some states, of trans adults as well. There are laws that ban discussion of queer issues in schools and force teachers to out students to their parents. There are book bans on queer and trans books alongside books addressing Black struggle. There are laws that ban trans people from using the correct bathroom — one city in Texas even went so far as to set a $10,000 bounty on trans people using the bathroom. Laws that ban trans people from updating their legal documents to match their gender and name.

These are the laws that Harris will follow? She’s not going to try to fight them? She’s not even denouncing them? This is a huge adaptation to the anti-trans offensive. It is equivalent to her saying she would “follow the law” on abortion. Trans rights vary hugely from state to state and in many states there are laws that absolutely should not be followed.

This adaptation to anti-trans politics is not new or isolated to Harris. In fact, it’s part of the Democrats’ larger shift away from trans issues. They didn’t have a trans speaker at the Democratic National Convention — for the first time since 2016 — and trans issues were only mentioned (briefly) by two speakers at the DNC, neither of whom had primetime speaking slots. Colin Allred, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, responded to anti-trans attacks by the Ted Cruz campaign by releasing an ad where he calls himself a Christian and proclaiming “I do not support boys in girls’ sports.”

The national Democratic Party has been trying to downplay trans issues for essentially the entirety of the current anti-trans offensive. They didn’t make it a major part of their case for democratic rights in the 2022 midterms, focusing instead purely on abortion. In 2023, Biden sent out guidance on, effectively, how to ban trans kids from sports and only mentioned trans rights for nine seconds in his State of the Union to offer vague support for trans youth. Now those nine seconds look positively progressive compared to the way that Harris is avoiding the issue all together and adapting herself to the anti-trans laws on the books.

This shift from the Democratic Party is part of a larger shift within liberalism and the center that has occurred during the anti-trans offensive. This shift has a lot to do with the increase in people coming out as trans and doing so at a younger age. This has thrown many members of the middle class into a crisis because, though they might support trans rights in the abstract, they don’t want their kids to be trans.

A clear example of how this kind of middle class hysteria can build is the anti-trans community that developed on Mumsnet, a parenting website in the UK. These parenting message boards became the launching ground for a whole pseudo-movement against trans rights in the UK which took up pieces of anti-trans feminism and combined it with more conservative thought about the centrality of the family. This merging, not limited to Mumsnet, became known as the “Gender Critical” movement and it has become quite influential in the UK — JK Rowling is a prominent “gender critical” advocate — and began to spread over into the United States.

A suspicious eye towards transness from the bourgeois media in the U.S. is not a particularly new phenomenon but it took on an increased visibility when, in the midst of anti-trans offensive’s harshest phases, the New York Times began to publish several articles which cast doubt on trans youth’s identities. These articles were directed towards the Times’ readership — which is to say, largely, middle-class liberal readers — and sought to give them a “scientific” or “rational” basis for their “gender skepticism.”

This spoke to a shift in the Democratic Party base against trans issues, especially among middle-class parents in the suburbs who the Democrats definitely didn’t want to push away. So, rather than defend trans rights, the Democrats largely dropped it for more popular issues like abortion. Now, as the Republicans make hay out of painting Harris and the Democrats as big supporters of trans people, the Democratic response can basically be summed up in Harris’s comments: they’ll follow (anti-trans) laws.

As all this has been happening, the major LGBTQ+ organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) — who are linked to the Democrats — have largely been sitting on their hands. A demonstration may be organized on the local level but there have been essentially no moves to build a national movement for trans rights during the offensive. Rather, they fostered illusions that the courts would protect us and that we should continue supporting the Democrats. Relying on the courts is a dangerous strategy because we’ve seen time and time again, especially with the current hard-right Supreme Court, that these institutions will not protect us. History shows that we win our rights through class struggle. As we wait for the Supreme Court to hear a case on the legality of banning gender affirming care for minors, we should be clear that we cannot put any faith in them. We need to build a movement to defend our rights in the streets, in our workplaces, and in our schools.

Unions, especially those representing education and healthcare workers, need to stand up and take part in this fight for our rights. These attacks, in addition to attacking a community with strong links to both of these sectors, limit the ability of education and healthcare workers to actually do their jobs. The tremendous power that these unions hold need to be turned against these laws and we must fight with all the methods of the working class — work protests, sickouts, and walkouts — to overturn these reactionary, draconian laws. In this, we also need to start building student and worker unity so that student organizations like Gay-Straight Alliances fight alongside teachers and their union. Further, these unions can play a vital role in helping shift the discourse around trans rights. Education unions could host spaces where parents could come and learn about trans issues. Healthcare unions could hold meetings on how best to care for your trans child, and what to expect from medical transition in all its diversity. Workers and the trans community must lock arms and fight this struggle together.

It would be disingenuous to say or imply that Harris and Trump are equals on trans issues — clearly, Trump is far worse. But we should expect more from our representatives than the promise to not make things worse. The situation for trans people in much of the U.S. is dire, and the way to reverse that is through a concerted civil rights movement on the streets, in our workplaces, and in our schools that demands the repeal of all anti-trans laws and free gender affirming care for all who want it. We won’t win this from Harris or the Democrats, we’ll win it with our united power.



Sybil Davis
Sybil is a trans activist, artist, and education worker in New York City.