A central issue that makes life hard for intersex people is
invisibility. Most people are unaware of
how common intersex individuals are, something I’ve often discussed on this
blog. But there’s a larger setting in
which the fact that sex is a spectrum gets erased, and that’s in descriptions
of biology and the animal kingdom as a whole.
One way this happens is when biology textbooks fail to mention the fact
that instances of intersexuality are found in all animals. Another way it happens is through what
we’re taught about those species in which hermaphroditism is the norm. It’s the latter that I want to illustrate for
you today, by examining about how we talk about a fish, the bluebanded
goby.
The bluebanded goby is a small and colorful fish, bright
orange-red with iridescent blue stripes.
Bluebanded gobies are hermaphrodites, with the ability to produce either
eggs or sperm. Each bluebanded goby can
switch from producing eggs to sperm or vice versa in the space of about two
weeks; externally, there’s very little difference between an egg-laying or
sperm-producing bluebanded goby. They
have a “sexual papilla” through which they can release egg or sperm, and it is
a bit pointier when in sperm-producing mode and a bit wider in its opening when
in egg-laying mode. Most bluebanded
gobies spend most of their lives in egg-laying mode. They live in mating groups, and typically
only one member of each group produces sperm, with the rest laying eggs,
maximizing the number of offspring the mating group can produce. It’s a neat arrangement. It’s also not one that you’re likely to hear
about if you are visiting an aquarium or keeping fish.
The intersex nature of the bluebanded goby is erased or
distorted in most descriptions of the fish, because our society is so invested
in the idea that sexual dyadism is natural and universal that we can’t see
evidence to the contrary right in front of our eyes. We don’t hear about it in our educations. Say, for example, you’re a schoolchild going
for an educational trip to an aquarium, and you see the pretty gobies
there. Here’s all you’d learn at the
Cabrillo Aquarium in San Pedro, California about the sex of bluebanded gobies:
“Recognized by an elongated robust body and two dorsal fins, males have longer
dorsal spines and a suction-like disc that is formed by the connection of its
pelvic fins.” (See here.) You’d hear yet another example of the “natural,
universal fact” that all animals are male or female, not evidence of the sexual
diversity of the natural world. Not only
does the hermaphroditism of the gobies go unmentioned, the “masculinity” of
bluebanded gobies in sperm-producing mode is exaggerated—they are said to have
“longer dorsal spines,” a phallic and aggressive description of a nonexistent
difference. In fact, scientists
determining whether a bluebanded goby is in egglaying or sperm-productive mode
do not look for any difference in dorsal spine length, only at the shape of the
sexual papilla. (Generally, a
sperm-producing bluebanded goby will be on the large side for the species, and
hence will have largish fins—but egglaying bluebanded gobies that are large
have the same size dorsal spines, and the dorsal fins on a given fish do not
change size when it moves between egglaying and sperm-producing modes.)
When popular educational sites do mention sex variance in the
bluebanded goby, they don’t explain the fact that all bluebanded gobies are
hermphrodites, capable of producing eggs or sperm. They instead tell a story of rare and
fascinating “sex changes” in fish that are otherwise binary in sex: “Males and
females are similar in coloration, however, males have a longer dorsal fin than
the females do. One interesting fact about blue-banded gobies is that if there
is no male present, the dominant female in a group of blue-banded gobies has
the ability to change her sex to that of a male.” (See here.) This description frames bluebanded gobies as
sexually dyadic, existing as males and females, except for the occasional
female who goes through a “sex change” in desperate times. The fact that all of the bluebanded gobies
are hermaphrodites, and that each time they move from group to group they have
the ability to move from egglaying to sperm-producing mode or vice versa, goes
unmentioned. Rather than undermining the
ideology of a natural sexual binary, the story of the rare “sex change”
actually bolsters it. “How bizarre and
rare is this deviation, a one-time move between natural binary sexes!”
Not only do educational sites teach that bluebanded gobies
are almost always “normal males and females” rather than always hermaphrodites,
the way they present goby “sex changes” reflects ideas about human gender
roles. The BBC Science and Nature
website states that bluebanded gobies “live in small groups with a single male
and multiple females. If the male leaves
or dies, the largest female changes sex.”
(Link here.) The story is one of a large, dominant male
with his harem of smaller females, and a burly female fish changing sex to
“rise” to male status and take over the harem.
This is how the story is told by most scientific articles about
bluebanded gobies that’s I’ve seen. Let
me quote a passage from a 2005 article in the Biological Bulletin on “sex reversal” in bluebanded gobies, so we
can examine this in more detail:
“Larger size often equates with increased success in
aggressive encounters and therefore social dominance, providing a proximate
mechanism for the size advantage hypothesis. In protogynous sex changers, the
most reproductively significant resource that dominance affords is “maleness”;
thus the reproductive payoff for dominance is extremely large, and females
would be highly motivated to increase their aggressive behavior in times of
social instability (i.e., in the absence of a dominant male).” (See here.)
I’ll now restate that passage in clearer English and make
overt its hidden assumptions: “Sex is binary but in some rare species ‘sex
reversal’ can occur. When it does occur,
it is from female to male, because everyone knows it’s better to be male. To be male is to be dominant and aggressive,
which is good. Usually in species where
‘sex reversal’ can occur, males keep the females in their place, but if there’s
no male around, the females will all want to battle because the winner will get
to be the male.” This just-so story
reaffirms all sorts of human gender stereotypes—and in so doing vastly distorts
the objective reality of bluebanded goby life.
The first way the scientific fable distorts reality is by
calling hermaphroditic gobies “males” and “females,” imposing binary sex
language on fish that are born hermaphrodites and can shift back and forth
between egglaying and sperm-producing modes multiple times in the course of
their lives. The term “sex reversal”
also implies two opposite sexes rather than one sex continuum. It would be much more reflective of objective
reality to speak in terms of shifts in reproductive modes among hermaphrodites
than about sex reversals between females and males.
The term “protogynous” used to describe gobies in the
article means “starting out female,” which not only implies that the fish are
not really intersex by nature, but also frames shifts in reproductive mode as
only occurring in one direction: from “female” to “male.” In fact, bluebanded gobies shift just as
easily from sperm-producing to egg-laying modes when entering a group with
multiple sperm-producing fish. (See here.) The idea that every bluebanded goby “wants to
be the male” is a projection of human ideologies onto fish behavior. The majority of bluebanded gobies at any
given time are living in egglaying mode because this conveys a reproductive
advantage for the group. One could just
as easily say that it’s obvious that most gobies “want to be female” since
that’s what most of them do, but that one of them has to make the sacrifice and
“be male” for the good of the group.
That would also be projecting emotions and motivations onto the fish, of
course. In fact, bluebanded gobies are
just hermaphrodite fish reproducing in the most efficient way possible by
operating in egglaying mode more often than sperm-producing mode. But the story we read is one of enforced,
devalued feminization and aspirational maleness, because that affirms sexist
human gender ideologies.
Entwined with these male-privileging gender ideologies is a
story about dominance and submission. As
the story goes, high status fish are dominant; low status fish are
submissive. The most aggressive and dominant
bluebanded goby “gets to be the male,” while the rest have lower status that
accords with their more timid female nature.
This narrative is so familiar in patriarchal society that scientists
seem not to notice it’s an ideology they’re imposing on nature in their
research and writing.
Here is what we do know about bluebanded goby reproduction,
stripped of human gender ideologies. In
this hermaphroditic species, the greatest number of offspring are produced when
most of the fish are laying eggs. So
they form mating groups or families, typically of 3-7, in which one of the
gobies’ bodies shifts to sperm-producing mode, and the rest shift to egg-laying
mode. The fish that takes on the
inseminating mode needs to be robust, because it must continuously mate with
the rest of the fish. When mating groups
form or change, the members all swim about actively, zipping toward one
another. (Actually, this behavior is
quite common, and regularly occurs between all of the bluebanded gobies,
including the egglaying ones in established groups.) What determines which goby in a new group
will take on the sperm-producing role is the behavior of the other fish. A goby being zipped at by a zippier fish will
dodge out of the way. This gets called
“submission” by scientists, but could just as well be termed “peacekeeping,”
and would most accurately be simply called “getting out of the way.” By engaging in this dance of zipping about, a
new group of gobies determines which of the fish is the most energetic and
robust. Often it’s a large fish, but
that’s not always the case. That fish
shifts to sperm-producing mode (unless it is already in that mode), and the
others shift to egg-laying mode (unless that is already the case).
Oh, and by the way, bluebanded gobies that are in
sperm-producing mode don’t “fight harder” to stay in that mode because they
“don’t want to be female.” If a group of
bluebanded gobies is assembled completely out of fish that are in
sperm-producing mode, all but one of them shift to egglaying mode. This takes the same amount of time as it does
for one sperm-producer to emerge from a group that is assembled out of gobies that
are all in egglaying mode, and leads to the same rate of fertility. (See here.)
So: by nature, bluebanded gobies are intersex fish that form
efficient mating groups of multiple egglayers and one inseminator, and shift
reproductive modes as they move from group to group. This is an interesting part of the wide
diversity of sexual arrangements in nature.
I believe that teaching people about this natural diversity would make
the world a better place for intersex people, as it would make it less likely
for us to be perceived as “unnatural” and “disordered.” But instead of teaching children about sexual
diversity, educational sites either completely deny that bluebanded gobies are
hermaphrodites, or only mention it as a story of rare and odd sex changes from
dyadic female to dyadic male. And
scientists, educated like the rest of us in this context, impose all sorts of
ideologies about binary gender roles onto what they observe about the fish,
perpetuating the problem of distortion.
Nature is so much more interesting than the stories we tell
ourselves about it. It’s time to stop
obscuring the objective fact of sexual diversity.
