In middle school, I’d often spend lunch in the safety of the media center. From where I sat reading, I remember fixating on the army-green library bindings of The Book of Knowledge encyclopedia set. How cool, I’d think, everything there is to know in the world is all in there, and all I have to do is open a book and find it!

In sixth grade, as soon as puberty hit, I realized I was attracted to guys. It was utterly clear. (The librarian had a very compelling poster of Tom Selleck up on her office wall, which clinched things.) But where did these feelings — that were so wrong according to everyone I knew — come from? Could I get rid of them? When I knew no one was looking, I pulled down the “H” volume of The Tree of Knowledge for my lunchtime reading to see if I could find some answers.

Fast forward to now, when I’m 43, happily married to a man, and getting a M.A. in Animal Studies. Through my research, I’m meeting scientist after scientist reporting on same-sex sexual behavior in the wild. The 11-year-old me would have gasped to hear it, but it turns out that The Book of Knowledge is wrong.

A recent study from Nature found that over 1,500 different animal species exhibit significant same-sex sexual behavior in the wild. It’s not just homosexual behavior, either—animals will change sex, bond for their lifetimes with same-sex partners, or be intersex. Virtually all queer behaviors in humans have analogs in animals.

Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality is my (long) letter to all the kids facing a rising tide of politically motivated messaging that’s telling them they are wrong and unnatural. It’s a profile of ten different animal species that “queer” our misconception that animals all dutifully divide themselves into male-female pairs. Nature is far more diverse than that!

Among the chapters:

Laysan Albatross: Around a third of Laysan Albatross nests are between females. They bond for life, and then have heterosexual sex outside of their union to get fertilized. (90% of birds are socially monogamous, meaning they bond for life, but only 25% are sexually monogamous.) Because female-female nests have twice as many eggs, this homosexual bonding actually increases the total number of offspring in each generation, leading scientist Jared Diamond to dryly wonder what males are for—evolutionarily speaking, of course.

Velvethorn Deer: 13% of white-tail deer (the most common North American species) are born intersex! Velvethorns grow antlers but never break out of their velvet covering, and have bodies closer to those of does. The velvethorns don’t join in the male or female groups, but instead strike off on their own, forming their own velvethorn societies, sometimes even adopting orphaned fawns. In the chapter, I use their intersexuality as a chance to discuss the question of whether an animal could ever be considered trans.

It turns out that these centuries of claims about homosexual behavior not existing in nature — that have led to death penalty statutes and widespread discrimination — were wrong. The absolute explosion of research into same-sex sexual behavior in the wild over the last 20 years establishes without a doubt that it’s natural. (The amicus brief that supported the striking down of the last anti-sodomy law in the U.S. in 2003 cited the wave of research into same-sex sexual behavior.)

Young queer people are recently under increased attack, and are quietly internalizing their wrongness and unnaturalness, with miserable consequences. Some will die from it. I wish I could tell each one that they don’t have the full story, that they are perfectly natural, and indelibly part of the animal kingdom—because of their queerness, not despite it.