A Field Guide to the Sexes

How to use this guide Each entry gives the organism, the assumption it breaks, a figure or two worth holding, and — where a claim travels further than its evidence — a “how it circulates / as it checks out” table. Click any entry to open its field notes. Sources are consolidated in the footer, with the route to each one marked.

The companion zine Strike “His” (No. 90) is the argument this catalogue serves, and it spends most of its pages on what all of this does not license. The organisms here are not evidence about human lives and this guide makes no such claim. What they establish is narrower and sturdier: the sentence there is one arrangement, and it is what life is does not survive contact with life.

Why “which assumption” is the sort The obvious sorts all failed. By taxonomy you get fish, molluscs and a fungus, which tells you nothing. By strangeness you are building a freak show, which is the oldest and worst way to write about this. What actually divides these nineteen is which part of the bundle each one takes apart — and that turns out to be a fact about the model rather than about the organisms. It also produces the guide’s finding: no organism here breaks all five. Each breaks one or two and keeps the rest, which is why the bundle held together so long.

Five things the model assumes at once

Say “there are two sexes” and you have made five separate claims. That the count is two. That yours is fixed for life. That you are one or the other, not both. That “male” and “female” each name one kind of thing. And that making more takes two of them. Each is true of an enormous number of organisms. None is true of all of them, and the counter-examples do not cluster — they are scattered across fungi, algae, ciliates, plants, molluscs, worms, crustaceans, fish, reptiles, birds and apes, breaking different claims in different places. Five sections, and a sixth where the form stops.

One · That there are two

Three organisms whose answer is 23,000, or 7, or none

Two · That yours is settled

Four that change, on a timetable set from outside

Three · That you are one or the other

Four that are both at once, and what that costs

Four · That each is one thing

Three species with more kinds of male than of sex

Five · That it takes two

Five where the arithmetic of making more does not hold

One · That there are two

When the answer to “how many” is not two

Three organisms for which the count is wrong in three different directions — far too high, modestly too high, and not applicable. The fungus is the one to hold onto, because it is not exotic: Schizophyllum commune is one of the most widespread fungi on Earth and is very likely growing on a fallen branch within walking distance of wherever you are reading this. The strange number is not out at the edge of life. It is on the log in the park.

Two · That yours is settled

When the body rewrites the answer it already gave

Four organisms that change sex in adulthood — a fish, a fish, a snail and a plant — and the point of putting them together is that none of them chooses. Every trigger here comes from outside: who died, who is above you in the stack, how good last summer was. This is the section most likely to be misread as a story about freedom, and it is very largely a story about hierarchy and resources instead. The companion zine opens by getting this wrong on purpose, at the age of ten.

Three · That you are one or the other

When one body does both jobs at once

Simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are not rare and not a compromise. And this is the section that refuses the obvious moral. If you expect being both to dissolve the conflict between the two roles, the flatworms are here to say otherwise: sexual conflict is not removed by hermaphroditism, it is relocated — from between two individuals to inside each one, where it is fought out with a pair of penises. The barnacle then removes a different assumption nobody noticed they were making.

Four · That each is one thing

When there are more kinds of male than there are sexes

Three species with two sexes and three or four heritable ways of being one of them — each held together by a chunk of chromosome that stopped recombining and now travels as a single unit. These break the bundle from the inside, without touching the count at all: you can grant that there are exactly two sexes and still find that “male” names three different animals with different bodies, different hormones and different lives. One of these is popularly called the bird with four sexes, and that is not what it is — its card says so.

Five · That it takes two

When the arithmetic of making more does not hold

Five organisms for which “two, of different kinds, and then a female carries” fails at a different join each time. One needs no male and courts anyway. One pairs female with female and raises chicks. One is a father who is pregnant. One is a male who dissolves into his mate. And one has the sex life the popular account is loudest about and the society it does not have. Two of these five are here to be uncomfortable, and the guide would be dishonest without them.

Where the form stops

Two cards that get no table

These two carry no reframe table, and the absence is the argument. A “how it circulates / as it checks out” table asserts that there is a verdict and that we hold it. For the first there is no verdict — there is a definitional disagreement between researchers, and running the apparatus over it would be borrowing the authority of a settled finding. For the second the card is about people, and a sounds-like / actually table over human bodies turns people into specimens, which is the one thing this guide must not do. Same rule as Field Guide No. 10, where the turtles people made get a different card rather than a smaller one. They are not counted among the nineteen entries.

Not: Not evidence about human lives. This is the refusal the whole guide is built around and it is first for that reason. This occurs in nature, therefore it is permissible concedes the premise rather than winning the argument — and the same sentence licenses the flatworm and the anglerfish. Nature does not authorise us. It only fails to convict us. Not a cabinet of curiosities. Every organism here is common, well studied, and doing something ordinary for its lineage. Schizophyllum commune is on a log in the park. The slipper limpet is on the beach in stacks. Strangeness is a property of the expectation, not of the animal. Not animals mapped onto human identities. The clownfish is not trans, the albatross pair is not a lesbian couple, the whiptails are not making a point. Those are our words for our lives, and lending them to organisms that cannot decline the loan flattens the animal and cheapens the word. Not a claim that sex is unreal or that biology is arbitrary. Anisogamy is real, gonads are real, and the two-sex arrangement genuinely is how an enormous number of organisms work. The error is universalising it — reading a description of the common case backwards as a requirement. Not a story about freedom. The sex changes in section two are triggered by a death, a hierarchy, or a poor summer. Nothing here chooses anything. A body that can rebuild its gonads is remarkable regardless, and it is not a liberation. Not a curated parade of the nice ones. Penis fencing has a loser who pays, the anglerfish male is digested down to a pair of gonads, and the bonobo card carries a correction to the peaceful-ape story rather than repeating it. A version of this guide with only the delightful organisms in it would be the same fallacy with better manners.

The line: Sixteen of the guides in this collection arrive at there is no standard star, nest, egg, shark, turtle, galaxy, nervous system, way to rest, way of being family — derived by reading every hit rather than counting them, since one guide matches the phrase in order to decline it. This one arrives somewhere more specific, because the thing it is refusing is not a stereotype but a number. The count is more than twenty-three thousand in a fungus on a fallen branch, seven in a pond ciliate that settles it by deleting the alternatives, and none at all in an alga whose gametes are the same size — and the same alga still has two mating types, so even no sperm and no egg does not mean no difference. Two is not the floor of biology and it is not the ceiling. It is one arrangement, spectacularly successful in animals and flowering plants, that we read backwards onto everything alive. There is no standard number of sexes. There was never a standard for anyone to fall short of.