There have been several people in the notes expressing that these are intersex peafowl and while I certainly won’t take that away from anyone (welcome, enjoy!), I feel that you should all know that there are regular intersex peafowl as well.
These peafowl grow in and retain sex characteristics of both hens and cocks, for their entire lives. They do not lay eggs or court, the way the other sexes do. Unlike a hen in henopause, they do not transition into or out of this state- they are born to it and remain in it their entire lives.
In reality, gender isn’t really a thing for peafowl (or birds in general) at all and sex is pretty much a grey area. We assign them sexes (yes, sexes, I’m getting there) based on human concepts of it, but they don’t even have x and y sex chromosomes. They have Z and w, and it’s flipped from how humans are; the bird with the 2-same chromosomes is a male (ZZ) and the bird with one of each is a female (Zw) and we only assigned the sexes like we did because the hens lay eggs. Don’t even get me started on the bird species that aren’t peafowl that have more than 2 sexes. But they have no concept of gender or sex. If they did, maybe they would argue their males are the ones that lay the eggs. There’s no way to know; they are just animals we’re projecting human concepts on. Biological sex really does fall apart if you look at it sideways, and gender was a mistake.
In any case, at least in one sense, the initial birds in this post are maybe not transgender, exactly, but they have made a transition from one state to another that heavily involves looking like a standard female and then looking like a standard male, and some people have found comfort and joy in relating to that. That end state is not really one sex or another, if you look under the hood so to speak, and hopefully other people will find joy and comfort in that as well. Yet other Peafowl have not ever transitioned and yet have the characteristics of multiple sexes their entire lives the same way, and I hope that this extra knowledge can bring joy and comfort to even more people.
That’s all this is about.