One June evening on a chartered fishing trip outside Pensacola Bay, Florida, I caught a long, greenish, purple-striped fish the guide called a “slippery dick.” I laughed and tried to grab the unhooked fish, but it shot through my hands back into the warm gulf. “Well,” I said, wiping off on a boat towel, “they certainly live up to their name.”

“They’re queer fish, that’s for sure,” the guide replied. 

“Queer?” I asked, not sure where this was going.

“I guess now you’d say trans.” He chuckled, glanced at me, then silently untangled my rig, perhaps remembering a prudent service industry approach to discussing politics, religion, and sexuality. 

“Interesting,” I said.  

He smiled and nodded. “You can Google it.”     

Aware of the sexual fluidity of some fishes and moderately informed by an online Smithsonian entry, I wanted a deeper story on these slippery dicks. 

The next day, I called my ichthyologist friend, Milton Love. Professor Love is a West Coast expert, but he knows the slippery dick, Halichoeres bivittatus, as a “charming, missile-shaped wrasse that can change its sex.” Famous for his quirky, humorous, and yet scientifically accurate field guides, Love added, “If you’re gonna mate, don’t do it half wrasse.”  

Although the word “dick” has long been associated with masculinity, slippery dicks, like most wrasses, are protogynous—a term borrowed from the Greek expression meaning female first. As protogynous sequential hermaphrodites, they start their lives as females, transitioning to males when nature demands. If I had held on to that slick dick, and it was the dominant male of their breeding lek above the sandy bottom, then the largest female would have, in about three weeks, transformed into the reigning stud. Protogyny describes the sexual orientation of many wrasses, parrotfish, groupers, porgies, angelfish, and swamp eels—all flourishing in Florida’s waters.  

Of all animals, fish are the most sexually adaptable, with over 500 species displaying some form of intersexuality. Perhaps the most famous trans fish is the clownfish, or anemone fish of the genus Amphiprion, with its apt prefix for going both ways. Clownfish are native to the tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and, in the case of Nemo, Walt Disney Studios. While wrasses are protogynous, clownfish are protandrous, born with ambisexual gonads. Clowning around their protective anemone, the group will be dominated by a large female, a smaller male, and one or more youngsters with undeveloped gonads. These top fish pair up monogamously for life until one, let’s say, is eaten by a barracuda. If it’s the female who perishes, the male rapidly transitions to take her place—his testes shrivel, and the ovarian cells wake up. The next most promising young sprat will literally grow a pair, develop testicles, and court the new leading lady.  

In the popular 2003 Disney Pixar film Finding Nemo—which my kids loved—clownfish parents, Marlin and Coral, suffer such a barracuda attack, and Coral is devoured. Marlin stays single and struggles to raise his surviving son, Nemo. But according to Lucy Cooke in the BBC’s Wildlife Magazine, “A biologically accurate version would have seen Marlin the dad transition into a female and start having sex with his son Nemo, which might have made for a less popular family film.”  

But clownfish incest is rare. “All clownfish around the anemone, except those developing in the eggs, are unrelated,” explains marine biologist Karen Haberman. We Zoom and exchange emails, and the retired professor is amazed by how much misinformation bounces around on the web. Professor Haberman clarifies that after clownfish eggs hatch, the young are wafted into open water, where there are fewer predators. After two or three weeks, they swim back to the reef, but not to their family.  

The little clowns “use odor cues to find both the reef and their new anemone,” Haberman says. “And this is key—they are repelled by the odor of their own parents and close kin.” 

Environmental degradation, however, has messed with this family-planning mechanism. Haberman points me to the research by Philip Munday, a marine ecologist at James Cook University in Australia. Professor Munday and his team found that clownfish hatching in lower pH water had a disrupted sense of smell and could not easily distinguish parents from those nonfamilial. With climate change contributing to marine acidification, higher ocean temperatures, and the decline of coral reefs, Nemo and his trans mom might have hooked up after all.   

And all this talk about trans fish might have intensified Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s bitter feud with Disney. The entertainment company criticized the governor’s 2022 “Parental Rights in Education” law—commonly called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill—which reads: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Disney CEO Bob Chapek called for the law to be “repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts,” reaffirming that the company is “dedicated to standing up for the rights and safety of LGBTQ+ members of the Disney family, as well as the LGBTQ+ community in Florida and across the country.” DeSantis threatened to revoke Disney’s favored status and raise its taxes and utility rates. 

“Oh, come on, Ron!” Stephen Colbert taunted the governor on his late-night comedy show. “You’re in Florida, don’t you know, you don’t mess with Disney? You ain’t Nemo. They’ll never find you.”

DeSantis, one of the nation’s most outspoken opponents of transgender rights, championed the passage of Florida’s new Trans Erasure Bill, which requires a person to identify as their sex assigned at birth, thereby prohibiting transgender people from updating driver’s licenses with their correct gender information. The bill also creates major health insurance obstacles for gender-affirming care. House Speaker Mike Johnson, from the nearby state of Louisiana with its own fertile trans fish coastline, shares these views. Johnson pushed hard for the recent Louisiana Bathroom Bill that bars transgender people from using public restrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity. In editorials Johnson wrote for his local Shreveport newspaper, he deemed homosexual and transgender lifestyles as “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous.”  

Nature is clearly indifferent to such pronouncements. “The fact that some animals change their sex is well known and often talked about in the trans community,” explains my daughter, Eris, a twenty-six-year-old trans woman. “It certainly refutes the ‘unnatural’ argument against us. But it’s not like we need such evidence. Even if humans invented being trans, it wouldn’t be immoral.” 

We talk about the nonbinary Swiss musician, Nemo, who produced the 2015 hit EP Clownfisch and won the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest. “Now the performer has their sights set on another milestone,” reported The Guardian, “convincing the Swiss authorities to allow non-binary designations on official documents.” In 2022, the Swiss government rejected a proposal to include a third gender or no-gender option on official records. “I think that’s absolutely unacceptable,” Nemo told the press after their big Eurovision win. “We need to change that.” 

Eris and I watch a video of Nemo performing their winning song, “The Code,” which explores gender fluidity, and we notice that their outfit resembles the color patterns of an actual clownfish. Eris reminds me, however, of reasons we should not always look to nature for role models: “Don’t clownfish eat their young?” We laugh and agree that natural analogies are fraught on many levels when it comes to understanding human behavior. The Latin name Nemo (or from the original Greek, Outis) means “nobody” or “everybody,” and has given brave figures as diverse as Odysseus in Homer’s epics, Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a wayward clownfish, and even the Swiss rapper a chance to conceal or remake their identities. 

In addition to fish and mammals, transgender behaviors have been observed in cephalopods, snakes, lizards, beetles, and birds. Australian giant cuttlefish, “by changing their pattern and posture to imitate a female, can slip unnoticed beneath the gaze of larger males—and then mate with their female partners!” writes Juliet Lamb, a biologist with The Nature Conservancy. Among many songbird species, “young males keep female-like plumage for a few years after maturity in an effort to escape detection by older, more powerful males.” Male Eurasian marsh harriers and large sandpipers, known as ruffs, may adopt long-term female appearances. This “deceptive sex signaling” gives the birds an “undercover” advantage in feeding and mating. In the case of the ruff, the female-presenting male may sneak past aggressive competitors and copulate with a willing hen. 

My daughter Eris listens and shakes her head. “I can hear conservatives saying, That’s just like those cross-dressing guys trying to get into the women’s locker room.” Presenting as or transitioning to the opposite sex does give these animals advantages. 

A Reddit thread for the term “fish”’ as applied to trans women explains its meaning as “a sweet, soft, pretty lady” and “you look feminine.” One responder wrote, “Among the trans women I know, it is a compliment, essentially meaning you pass well.” 

“It’s survival,” Eris says. “We all have that in common. I just want to be happy and survive.”

Thinking more about fish survival closer to home, I email Milton Love and ask about sex-changing fish species off the Oregon coast. “I don’t know of any fish species north of California that changes sex,” Dr. Love responds. “California has two goby species, at least two wrasses, and a rarely seen parrotfish that all change sex, but none extend farther than northern California.” I joke that it seems unfair transphobic Florida gets all this sex-fluid marine life, while liberal Oregon is left with a bunch of cis fish. “Yeah,” Dr. Love writes back, “no one has accused Nature of playing fair.” 

It’s five o’clock on a Friday, and Eris asks if I’d like a drink. 

“Sure,” I say. “How about a slippery dick?”  

We laugh. I’ve been talking about that species all week, and when Eris searched online, she also found a cocktail with the same name.  

She reads the recipe, tilting her head with concern. “Do we have any peach schnapps?”  

We find a sticky bottle of peach schnapps at the back of the cabinet, and Eris splashes some over ice in tall Collins glasses. Then she adds Triple Sec, vodka, orange juice, and 7UP. It’s one of those spring break concoctions that are dangerously sweet, strong, and linguistically transgressive. Remember the slippery nipple, blowjob, and slow screw? I sure remember the hangovers.

“I hear these cocktails are very popular in Florida,” she says with a smile. 

“Yeah,” I nod and take a sip. “But the governor demands the name be changed—for the drink and the fish.”

“It doesn’t matter what we call them,” Eris says. “Florida will always have its slippery dicks.”