#I know it's unethical but I could fully see Marco combining DNA from a few girls

[intentionalsprinkles]

The amount of time I have spent thinking about gender and sexuality in Animorphs....

Gonna preface this by saying that I think the presentation of gender and sexuality in Animorphs is a product of the time they were written and 100% think it would be handled differently today - like I don't think it would be assumed that almost everyone is straight and cis. But anyway.

Gender for the Hork Bajir seems pretty straightforward and familiar. They have the recognition of male and female genders and a pair-bonded child rearing arrangement. No one in the books is getting into granular detail about how exactly their reproduction works, in terms of sperm/egg/childbirth, but it's pretty recognizable to the humans. Same deal with Andalites, with bonus sexism.*

*Something I really enjoy that KAA explored! I wonder if it initially started from a standard male=default mindset - like every Andalite character she showed us for the first part of the series (with the exception of Ax's parents) was explicitly a member of the military, so she made them male without thinking about it much. Then at a certain point maybe she realized that there was no particular reason for them to be male, and worked that into her worldbuilding as another example of Andalites not being such great folks.

Taxxons.....I would have to re-read 43 to be 100% sure, but I don't know that there's any actual mention of Taxxon genders, breeding or family life. (Thank Glob.) Arbron is referred to with he/him pronouns, but he identified as male in his Andalite body, so I'm not willing to draw any conclusions about Taxxon gender or sexuality from that.

The Yeerks is where things really get interesting to me. They are stated to breed by three Yeerks coming together, becoming one, and then breaking into (dozens? hundreds? thousands?) of smaller grubs. Which is so interesting, that the act of reproduction is also the act of death for them! How does that work with regards to who breeds? Is it an honor or is it an assigned duty? Their culture as we see it is highly individualistic; I just can't picture Visser Three deciding to die to propagate the species, you know? Is breeding the end of the natural life cycle for Yeerks? So they eventually choose to die? Or do they automatically get the urge to breed when they are close to dying? Or when population numbers get low, does the Council of Thirteen order a bunch of lackeys to breed/die whether they like it or not?

The fact that there are three Yeerks involved in breeding suggests one of two possibilities to me: either there are three genders and one of each is needed to reproduce, or Yeerks are functionally genderless, and any individual Yeerk has the capability of breeding with any other two. I'd say the textual evidence supports the latter position more.

Throughout the series we get a lot of information about the Yeerks. I don't recall ever seeing a Yeerk identify as a different gender than their host body. The one exception might be Visser One - in Visser, her Hork Bajir body is referred to as being male. However, this is being remembered by her in her current host body of Eva, and she certainly seems to identify as female in the present day of the book. So did she identify as male initially since her Hork Bajir host was male, and then switch to identifying with Jenny/Allison/Eva's female gender?

There is a reference in Visser to any good Yeerk picking up the mannerisms of their host body. To me it seems like gender is a part of that. Like to a Yeerk, the gender of their host is akin to their language or personality- something that the Yeerk will use and mimic to be more successful in controlling them. They certainly pick up the human desire to pair-bond (seen in 8 and Visser), even though there's no real reason why pair-bonding would have evolved for them, given their means if reproduction.

Given that we have multiple first-person Yeerk narratives and never a mention of any gender other than their hosts, I interpret that as meaning that Yeerks don't really have gender, either culturally or physiologically.

It's interesting to contrast the Yeerk way, where they pick up the gender of the body they're in, with the Animorphs view of gender as they morph. They never once identify as anything other than their human gender, even when they are explicitly in morphs that are the other gender.

(I think that KAA was obviously trying to keep it PG with regards to never having an Animorph morph a human of the other gender, because, let's be real, if I was in a relationship with someone of the opposite gender and I had the ability to morph, I would COMPLETELY want to morph each other and feel what sex was like for a guy. Maybe that's just me? But like I do not buy that Marco, for example, never thought about morphing a girl. But that's neither here nor there.)

Thank you for coming to my lecture, guys, gals, and nonbinary pals. Stay tuned for Part 2: Tar Gibbons from Aliens Ate My Homework is an NB Icon.