The Self Doesn’t Stay Still or Singular

Sequential Hermaphroditism in Fish

A neon streak, sequin blink of lime, then cerulean. The bluehead wrasse needles its technicolor way through the reef. Thalassoma bifasciatumis is less a fish and more a verb. These fish live fast, a meteor-streak of two years. And in that brief oceanic arc they manage to encompass more genders and sexual strategies than most beings do in a span of many decades.

All bluehead wrasse are born female, from a mysterious mating process called broadcast spawning that involves the simultaneous release of eggs and sperm into a water column that hovers like an erotic cloud above the reef. Sex happens outside a heteronormative pairing, and it also happens external to very bodies of the fish. The ocean itself becomes the sensual landscape for this reproductive event. Lovers don’t meet face to face. The water acts as surrogate body for the wrasses sensual exchange.

As these initially females mature, some go through a process that turns them male, although these “males” occupy a liminal realm for some time, continuing to resemble and live with the females, before becoming “terminal males” – a term that does seem to wryly nod to our own anthropocentrically blinkered idea of gender as a static death sentence This ability to switch genders isn’t limited to pubescence though. Research has shown that it can be triggered by social reshuffles, the death of a dominant fish, or the unequal distribution of the opposite sex. The terminal males often take control of a “broadcast spawning” population of females, preventing aggression in other males as they assert themselves. By the end of a bluehead wrasse’s short life it may have reproduced along the entire gender spectrum: as a female in a pair spawning territory of one large terminal male, as a female in a group spawning event, as a small male still resembling and behaving as a female in a group spawning event, and as a dominant terminal male in its own spawning territory. Unlike in our modern paradigms of identity and sexual orientation, there is no final destination body or reproductive strategy for the wrasse. There is no stable gender or stable sexual behavior. The only stability to be found is in the wrasse’s ability to change shape and orientation.

What the bluehead wrasse shows me is that our genders and our sexualities are fluid, oceanic events that don’t just happen in our single selves and bodies. They spawn above us in the places where cultures meet, syncretize, and fuse symbiotically. And that they are always relational processes rather than singular possessions. The wrasse changes gender and orientation in relationship to a whole community of other wrasses.

In an amplification of this relational mode of becoming, chalk bass often changes gender up to twenty times a day. This is often in relationship to the changes of their long-term monogamous partner, and is hypothesized to relate to the energy expenditure of gestation and egg-laying. The responsibility is shared across partners.

Anemonefish switch back and forth, often occupying a transitional gender that is quite impossible for researchers to properly define. Gender and sexual fluidity are commonly seen as a strategy for oceanic life, where the sexual body is bigger than single selves. It is the entire sea.

How can we buck the dominant culture’s seductive paradigm of self-capture? How can we, like the bluehead wrasse, the chalk bass, celebrate that our queerness is a group event, a bodily question, a hermaphroditic flowering that doesn’t stay still?

Let me be differently every day. In my comet-streak life, let me experience as many flavors of aliveness as the bluehead wrasse. Let me send my queerness up and out of my body, to spawn in the waters of illegibility.

Sources: Bitch by Lucy Cooke brought these wonderful beings to my attention. I highly recommend her deep dive into queerness and ecology.

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My first novel The Madonna Secret arrive August 15th. You can read more about the book here and pre-order from any online bookseller. There will be an in person book event and party at 2 pm at Saint Gregory’s in Woodstock hosted by The Golden Notebook on August 13th. Please come and celebrate!

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