By- Ishita Sharma
Abstract
Arguments about how people may live often end with an appeal to nature, on the assumption that nature keeps a fixed order of true selves against which some lives count as counterfeit. This article tests that assumption against three biological deceptions: the bee orchid, the mimicking hoverfly, and the predatory Photuris firefly. None of these conceals a true self beneath a false one; there is only performance, judged by whether it works on an audience. Read against India’s Section 377, the cases suggest that “it’s natural too” is the wrong reply, because nature was never the judge to begin with.
Introduction
On a warm afternoon in southern Europe, a male bee lands on a flower and tries to mate with it. To him, it looks like a female bee, feels like one, and smells like one: the plant copies the scent a female gives off when she is ready to mate. He keeps trying, gets nowhere, and flies off, carrying pollen he will rub onto the next flower that deceives him the same way. This is the bee orchid, it produces no nectar and offers its pollinator no reward. It survives by sexual deception; it does not attract bees so much as dupe them.
We reach for nature constantly when we argue about people. A way of living is defended or attacked on the grounds that it is “natural” or “unnatural.” Who may love whom, what men and women are supposedly built for, what a “real” family looks like: sooner or later, someone points to nature as the final authority. The assumption is that beneath all our culture and our choices lies a natural order telling us what we really are and how we are meant to behave. So we should look at nature to see whether it actually contains a rulebook of that kind. The bee orchid is a useful place to begin, because it is doing the one thing nature is supposed never to do: lying.
Except that it is not really lying, for lying requires a truth to conceal, and the orchid has none. There is no secret bee-self tucked inside the flower that the disguise covers up. It is simply a flower that broadcasts a bee’s mating signal convincingly, because over millions of years, the flowers that did so left more offspring than those that did not. Nothing is being hidden, the performance is the whole organism. If you went looking for the “real” orchid beneath the disguise, hoping to catch it being its true self, you would find nothing there but more orchids.
There is a human word that fits this better than “lying,” and it comes from drag. In the ballrooms of Black and Latino queer New York, the world documented in Paris Is Burning, performers competed at “realness”: not at being a thing, but at passing convincingly as it. One could win at “executive realness” or “schoolgirl realness” by performing the look and the manner so well as to pass unremarked in a world that was often hostile. Realness was never a matter of inner truth; it was a skill, judged entirely by how well it worked on those watching. By that measure, the orchid excels: it performs female-bee realness, and the male bee is the only judge it must convince.
A disguise
Look closer, and nature turns out to be crowded with performances of this kind. Consider the hoverfly, a harmless and stingless fly marked in the warning yellow and black of a wasp, so that birds, wary of being stung, leave it alone. The puzzling part is that many hoverflies are poor copies. Set one beside a real wasp and it is clearly inaccurate in shape and detail. For a long time, this troubled biologists: why has selection not refined the disguise? The answer is that the fly is not trying to resemble a wasp to us, nor even to match any particular wasp. It need only trip a rough alarm in a bird’s brain: yellow and black, possibly dangerous, not worth the risk. It is not copying a real wasp; it is copying whatever shape that alarm takes inside the bird. The disguise is aimed at an easily fooled audience so the disguise can be imperfect and still succeed.
Some of these performances are lethal. In the warm dark of an American summer, fireflies flash to find mates, each species with its own coded rhythm of light. The males of one genus, Photinus, flash their pattern and wait for a female to answer. A female of another genus, Photuris, has learned to counterfeit that answer. She flashes back exactly what a Photinus female would, the hopeful male descends to her, and she seizes and eats him. She is neither expressing some inner firefly truth nor betraying one. The flash is merely a tool, and a borrowed one. The most important signal in her life is a forgery, and there is no “real” self beneath it for the forgery to betray.
No original beneath the copy
The three cases share a feature. In none is there a true version concealed beneath a false one: the orchid is not a “real” something pretending to be a bee, the hoverfly is not a wasp at heart, and the firefly does not betray her own nature, since her nature is simply to flash whatever yields a meal. And in each the disguise exists only in relation to an observer, nothing without a bee to fall for it, a bird to be deterred, a rival firefly to read the flash as a promise. The disguise is not a private fact about the creature; it is a relation between the creature and its audience. There is no fixed inner “what it really is” to uncover, only what works, upon whom, and when.
One might object that this is merely a trick of language. An orchid has no true self hidden inside it, but it has no self at all, no more than a stone does, and this tells us nothing about human beings, who do have inner lives. The objection is fair, and it is precisely the point. I am not claiming that the orchid reveals anything about what lies within a person. I am making a claim about nature itself. When someone says the natural order settles how we should live, they are imagining nature as a book of fixed, true essences. No such book exists. The living world does not keep true selves filed beneath false fronts. It runs on disguise, mimicry, and borrowed or altered signals, performances judged only by whether they work.
Section 377 and the Order of Nature
This is not an abstract worry. For more than a century and a half, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code punished what it called carnal intercourse “against the order of nature,” and was used to harass and criminalise people of the LGBTQIA+ community. The law made nature the test, and treated certain lives as offences against it. When the Supreme Court read down that provision in 2018, one of its observations was that homosexuality occurs throughout the animal kingdom and so cannot fairly be called against nature. That is the tempting reply, and it is true as far as it goes: same-sex pairing and sex change occur across the living world once one looks for them. Yet the reply contains a trap: to answer “it’s unnatural” with “no, it’s natural” is still to let nature deliver the verdict; it merely asks for a gentler one. Even the biologists who catalogue these behaviours caution against the move: that an animal does something should not be what makes a human life acceptable.
The orchid points to a better answer. I am not saying that biology is meaningless, or that people have no depths. I am saying that the thing the argument reaches for: nature as a fixed order of true selves and counterfeits, the real and the fake, is not there to be reached for. The living world keeps no “order of nature” in the sense the phrase requires. It holds only performances that work, flowers that succeed by breaking that very order, none concealing a true self beneath a false one. Nature was never the judge of how we ought to live.
Conclusion
If nature is not the judge, something else must be. The questions worth asking are not whether some plant or animal also does it, but human ones like whether it is freely chosen, whether it harms anyone, whether it can be reconciled with treating people as equals who are owed dignity. These are the judgments we must make ourselves, and the firmer ground on which Section 377 fell. What endures from that 2018 judgment is the recognition that a person’s intimate life, where it harms no one, is their own, not that homosexuality is natural because animals practise it. It is a matter of dignity, privacy, and equality, settled on human terms rather than referred to nature. The orchid cannot tell us how to live, nothing in nature can, it can only rid us of a bad question and leave us the better ones to answer for ourselves.
About the Author:
Ishita Sharma is a fifth-year law student at Jindal Global Law School, India. She is passionate about gender justice and social equity. Her research interests span across law, social work, and public policy, with a commitment to advocating for systemic change and helping those in need.
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