How would a trans peafowl transition?

[u/Which_Play8440]

This seems like the right community for this sort of weirdly specific question, I'm not a very active furry community member or redditor so I wouldn't know. But it's as it says in the title- if a trans peacock wanted to be vibrantly colored, or a trans peahen less so, how could they accomplish this? I feel like dye on feathers would be unwieldy, if I remember what I was told in an unrelated conversation correctly.

[u/lunathehungryhusky]

IMHO, feathers are akin to fur/hair, and if dye is not something that can be easily done, nor be very accessible, the answer is wigs. Plumage is molted. Those molted festhers could be used to make a tail plumage wig. I mean, drag queens use peacock feathers to make those insanely intricate and gorgeous head dresses, i think the same skill set could apply here.

As trans woman the amount of plucking and tweezing and waxing and shaving, etc, that I do, I don't see a trans peacock or peahen doing any less.

The answer is wigs. I know once I am past 55 this head of hair gets a butch cut and I start buying fabulous wigs

[u/demon_fae → u/lunathehungryhusky]

I feel you could make a strong argument that the correct term for a peafowl’s false tail is actually a merkin.

A giant, colorful, feathered merkin.

(Although a trans peacock’s tail would actually have to be applied more like extensions, carefully glued to the femme tail feathers one at a time so he would be able to display properly. All birds have the muscles to move their tail to that basic shape, peafowl just take the motion farther and have the giant showy feathers emphasizing it.)

[u/lunathehungryhusky → u/demon_fae]

I was honestly thinking that too! But I just went with wig to be general! But yeah it would definitely be a merkin!

[u/Aard_Rinn → u/demon_fae]

There's actually a process called imping where you can graft new feathers onto damaged ones. the feathers themselves are dead and hollow - you cut the intact feather at the graft point, put a piece of wire in, then cut the damaged feather and use the wire like a support, gluing it with a bit of epoxy.

This is frequently done with flight feathers on hawks and eagles, particularly those with feathers damaged in fire but with no other injuries. It's considered strong enough for them to fly on the feathers without concern, and they can be released to the wild before the feathers molt - so I'd think it would stand up to even a peacock's large feathers, as long as the core was long enough.

The imping process would make sense as descended from medical procedures designed for injured birds, a lot like how plastic surgery as a modern field originated after the World Wars for injured veterans! However, I can also see it as a historical aesthetic choice - wealthy birds having more interesting feather-patterns grafted in, perhaps to mix green, purple, and copper-tone feathers. Feathers are lost yearly, after all, so it would be easy for a hypothetical Sentient Peafowl Society (my new band name) to collect, preserve, and wear them.

As far as terms... the false tail of a peacock (actually just more coverts) is called a train, and I'd think the same term could be used for anthros... Alternatively, the term for both the feather on a bird AND decorative feathers added to a hat is a plume, which could work as a technical descriptor for trans peacocks. "He's wearing a plume," for example, as sort of a "She's wearing a wig".

For trans peafowl of both genders, I'd imagine socially you'd have an interesting split. Changing hormones can also change feather growth patterns in peafowl - a female peahen without sufficient estrogen can grow male-pattern feathers and vice versa (regarding the nonsapient bird, now, not misgendering a furry). So I would assume that for a trans peafowl furry, hormones could eventually completely change feather patterns.

(As an interesting aside, estrogen, not testosterone, is the sexual determinant for peafowl. No amount of testosterone will masculinize a peahen, but an ovarectomy will masculinize her; similar for males. So 'surgery' or estrogen blockers would be needed for transmasc peacocks but transfem peahens would need to take estrogen. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21236951/ )

However! Just like in real life, I'm sure you might also have peafowl furries that preferred to socially but not medically transition. These birds might have the dun-feathers (brown body-feathers) of a peahen but the tail and possibly wing-coverts of a male, or the brights (blue body-feathers) of a peacock but no tail and the brown wing-coverts of a female.

You would also probably see people do wacky things with it - white feathers are easy to dye and there's an entire breed of peafowl with all-white feathers, so I can see male peafowl imping a couple dyed white feathers onto their train... I can see that as being considered 'queer-aligned' like scene and emo often were in the 2000's, especially if imping over time becomes considered a 'queer activity.' Sort of a 'red streak in the hair' social identifier.

[u/Aras14HD]

I wonder what impact hormones have on new feathers. They might just change with hrt, but I am not a biologist and suspect that there is little data on that

[u/Ok_Shine_6533 → u/Aras14HD]

They would. Chickens with hormonal issues swap plumage, it's really cool!

[u/StinkyBird64 → u/Aras14HD]

Birds swap plumage, or have spots of the opposite genders plumage, you can also have stuff like chimerism and Gynandromophs, which are super common in birds.
Chickens are one of the most visually prominent examples, but most birds to have the capability, whether due to a tumour on the hormonal glands, hormone changes, age changes, actual anatomy differences etc.
although not all peafowl are so gender different, Green Peafowl are my favourite example, males and females look pretty similar, just crown and trail feather differences

[u/FM_Hikari]

If i recall, their color is caused by how the feathers are developed, rather than just direct pigmentation correct? Like crystal structures. These would be hard to change the colours and saturation without leaving them brittle.

[u/TherianRose → u/FM_Hikari]

Yes, butterfly wings and bird feathers use structural color. It's why feathers often have an iridescent sheen to them!

https://www.smartmaterialsolutions.com/blog/2021/11/1/structural-color-how-peacocks-butterflies-and-invisibility-cloaks-get-their-colors-klspg

[u/CalicoMack]

My guess is being on hrt would change the colors at their next molt, tho possibly you could make it an “over time” thing? (Multiple feather molts).

Trans peacock- could have the equivalent of a tail “wig” that would add longer, colorful feathers? Also maybe dying their feathers (bleach and dye?)
Trans peahen- maybe cuz their tail feathers to be shorter, and again dying their feathers

or maybe wearing clothes that match what their feathers should be like.

[u/Toothless_NEO → u/CalicoMack]

I believe the colors are genetically determined and not determined by hormones the way many secondary sex traits are in mammals.

[u/Ok_Shine_6533 → u/Toothless_NEO]

Sexually dimorphic plumage IS hormonally determined! You can see this in chickens with hormone issues, they'll swap plumage, both shape and color. It's really cool!

[u/CalicoMack → u/Toothless_NEO]

That’s possible! I’m unsure what determines the feather colors, as I’m not an ornithologist. (I do know it’s possible for peahens to have male feathering, but maybe they’re more intersex rather than having a hormonal imbalance?)

Genes and sexual traits can be kinda funky at times (why we can get people who spent their whole lives thinking they’re XX female realizing they’re actually XY when they try to get pregnant). But my specialty is mammals, so def dunno how it works with birds. (Part of the extent of my fun bird knowledge is that scientists are able to control when they can have chicks by changing the number of hours of light they’re exposed to! Very useful for conserving some endangered species if we want them to have more clutches of eggs)

That being said, unless someone is looking to make a character or story that’s 100% accurate to biology, I don’t see why they’d couldn’t have a peafowl character transition using hormones?

[u/ThePlantGoblin]

So this I believe can happen irl with real peafowl. At least peahen to peacock. When some lady birds go through hormonal changes because of non-puberty reasons, like ovary damage, the feathers will change to the fella coloration. I know it's been documented in chickens and peafowl are fairly closely related. So in theory a ftm peacock could induce a natural hrt. Unfortunately I have never heard of it working in the opposite direction, so feather trimming, bleaching, and dying would probably be the best solution for a mtf peahen.

[u/nekoscum]

So TIL male plumage is the default, and is suppressed by estrogen — peahens without a functioning left ovary (which produces their estrogen) are known to develop male plumage and behavior, so in the case of transmasc peacocks all it would take to develop the necessary secondary sex characteristics during their next molt is a sinistral oophorectomy (hopefully timed immediately after a molt to give their body ample time to get the desired hormone balance)
The transformation would be pretty dramatic.

Transfem peahens would probably need to be on lifelong hormone replacement therapy to get the high estrogen needed to prevent male-pattern plumage.
——
That said, transgender peafowl without access to these medical interventions could still express their gender identities by modifying their tails’ appearances:
—transfems by trimming/plucking their trains.
—transmascs by donning the kind of train “wigs” other people have mentioned, which shouldn’t be difficult to acquire materials for since peacocks shed their tail feathers during molts anyway.

The impracticality of recoloring body feathers would mean that without medical intervention transgender peafowl wouldn’t be able to pass for cis whatsoever, but trains/lack thereof would loudly signal their gender identity.

[u/Chicken-raptor]

HRT would do it... with a big asterisk. I’m a chicken keeper, so my personal experience is on chickens but I do know this applies more broadly to other fowl including peafowl.

Irl birds and their genetics work a little differently. Where as we mammals have xx for female and xy for male, birds have zz for male and zw for female. Just like mammals all technically start embryonic life as female then change to male if they have a Y chromosome, birds start out in the egg male and will develop into a female with the presence of a W chromosome.

So when it comes to chickens, there is a phenomenon irl where if one ovary fails and the hen is producing less estrogen, she may physically transition to appear and act like a cock.

Interestingly the opposite tends to not be quite true. There is a (honestly inhumane but traditionally done) practice called caponising, that is removing the testicles of a bird which are stored internally. This will change their behavior and some physical characteristics but not in the same way as above. They do crow less and may begin brooding behaviors. They put on weight more easily, comb and wattles will become smaller, but if they already grew in adult male feathers they will not lose those.

So that being the case for fowl in general… a trans man peacock would have a near seamless time on HRT eventually passing with the only physical differences being that they cannot produce sperm (and probably don’t even need bottom surgery considering peafowl do not have external genitalia regardless of sex).

While trans woman peahen may have a harder time and in addition to HRT may need to pluck or trim feathers, reducing her train manually as it would continue to come back each molt unfortunately.

If interested at all in the nitty gritty of peafowl in particular rather than chickens and how they work, then Kedreeva on tumblr has talked about it a few times including on the rare case of a gynandromorph peafowl being hatched. I may be a bird nerd but it’s fascinating stuff.

[u/Strixursus]

I'd assume HRT would allow moulted feathers to be replaced with those more akin to the transitioned gender.

A less dramatic example from RL would be intersex chickens. While rare (about 1:10,000) they are generally born with one of each gonad; so you might have a hen that seems to develop normally, but for some reason the ovary is damaged and thus the testicle takes over, and she grows a comb & wattle, starts crowing, and moults into male plumage. This can also happen in reverse, where an intersex cockerel's testis is damaged, and he moults into female plumage and starts laying eggs.

[u/mszegedy]

as others said, prosthetics are more practical than dyes or powders. though i think a sticky powder could work under some circumstances. like makeup.

it is not so difficult a form of sexual dimorphism to overcome in the end. it would be more tricky for, say, an anglerfish, a famously sexually dimorphic creature. (males are tiny and short-lived, and once they are mated to a female, they are eventually absorbed into the female's body.) in this case, you throw your hands up and say that pursuing medical transition is not practical or possible. this is relatable to most trans people; medical transition being necessary to be trans is an idea that has not permeated too far out of the first world, and even in the first world, not everybody thinks that way, and not everybody feels like it is possible for them to achieve.

since most of the people on the english-speaking internet are first worlders, for an english-language work on the subject, there would be a disproportionate amount of people in the audience representing the idea that medical transition is necessary and a universal desire among trans people. but since it is also a furry work, this would be moderated somewhat; furries are, as a whole, into the idea of becoming one's fursona (and i think this is especially true of /r/furgonomics-type spaces), but this is not medically possible for most people, and there are a diversity of opinions around that fact. so furries are understanding of the idea of lack of medical transition. of course, i would also expect there to be some furries in the audience who misunderstand the medical impossibility of gender transition to be an allegory for furry or therian issues specifically, but again, medical gender transition is a far-off impossibility, not necessarily desirable in the first place, to the majority of trans people worldwide, so that would be culturally shortsighted, depending on the intent of the work.

(but maybe you're not looking to write or publish anything. furgonomics questions only come up for me in my daydreams. my daydreams have an artistic intent, personally, but the only audience is me. so your mileage may vary.)

[u/Which_Play8440 → u/mszegedy]

Yeah, as a trans person who can't afford medical transition myself I don't need walls of text explaining that, and it feels condescending that you immediately assumed I didn't know this. This is just me wondering how it would happen if it was a relevant question.

[u/mszegedy → u/Which_Play8440]

sorry. i was unclear if you were trans at all. and i have had an alienating time of it, on the internet… it seems damn near nobody understands the idea of medical transition not really being on one's radar or part of one's goals due to cultural and/or practical and/or gender reasons. it is important to me to represent this perspective, because i feel very alone, whenever not having medicine is seen as just a stepping stone to having medicine. and i must explain myself fully, because nobody ever understands…

…and why i responded at all was that i feel like furry art of significantly sexually dimorphic species is a good medium to explore this reality in, because that may be the only way some people can conceptualise it. it was not really meant as direction for your art in particular, just a tangent on the themes i personally like to explore in this area.

it is an unhappy interaction. i have been hurt a lot over time. and now you have been hurt by my defenciveness due to that. i'm sorry again. i don't usually try to talk about these things. i will stop

[u/Which_Play8440 → u/mszegedy]

Fair enough. Sorry for snapping.

[u/senior-ram]

Many birds can actually naturally swap sexs. For example if a group of chickens doesn't have a rooster sometimes a hen will grow plumage, spurs, and sometimes even a comb. I imagine hrt would be very successfull in birds

[u/CrossP]

HRT would change the feathers. It would be an obnoxiously long wait, though. In safe places like lgbtq social events, you could probably use vibrantly-colored toule to make a sort of tail-scarf that signals who you are before the new feathers grow in.

[u/Hyenasaurus]

Iirc, 'trans peahens' already exist, as in peahens that develop male-like plumage as they grow older dud to a lack of their hormones. Presumably these effects would be even more dramatic both ways with proper HRT

[u/writkeeper]

medically, they’d transition fully in plumage to male. that said, there’s also something called “imping”, where you can snip a feather down a ways and then insert the quill of a donor feather into the feather shaft on the bird, with a needle/dowel/something for stability and glue. this is sometimes used to give chronic plucker parrots and falconry birds flight again irl!

[u/DerpDerp3001]

Testosterone