Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary
By Agustín Fuentes
Princeton University Press, 216 pages, $24.95
Agustín Fuentes, author of Sex Is a Spectrum, has a doctorate from one prestigious academic institution (Berkeley), a professorship at another (Princeton), and has published his book with a leading academic press (Princeton again). His book’s grave faults, then, reflect not only on the author but on a broader academic environment that has credentialed him and promoted his work.
Fuentes, an anthropologist who has extensively studied macaques, begins with a primer on the evolution of sexual reproduction in life on the planet. To show how “interesting” sex is, he offers the example of the bluehead wrasse, a fish species in which females can turn into males in given ecologies. The example, he says, is “not that weird” in biology.