Five Questions for Agustín Fuentes

>>   Okay, let’s go ahead and get started. So hello and welcome everybody, my name is

Chip Colwell and I’m an anthropologist and the editorial director of sapiens magazine and I’m here with Dr.

Agustin Fuentes who is a director of anthropology at Princeton University and a little introduction if I could. Agustin is a friend and a colleague and a renown scholar and so I’m just so excited to have him here today.

From chasing monkeys in jungles and cities to exploring the lives of our evolutionary ancestors to examining human health behavior and diversity across the globe.

Professor Fuentes is interested in both the big questions and small details of what makes humans and our close relations tick.

His projects include exploring cox, human belief and much more.

Fuentes was awarded the inaugural communication award from the American association of biological anthropologist and we’re so happy to have you here, with us here today /PRA*FLT so before we jump in, two notes.

One is if you have any questions for Agustin please use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen and I will pick one or two of those questions for Agustin to answer.

And then also if you are interested in purchasing Sex is a Spectrum, the book we’ll be talking about in the next 25 minutes or so.

Princeton University press has generously offered a Jen one time discount of 30 percent and I will paste the details into the chat here shortly so you can use that based on our, sorry, the close of our time here together.

Okay, so again, welcome, Agustin. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here and spending some time with us.

Congratulations on the publication of Sex is a Spectrum, The Biological Limits of the Binary.

This is just such an incredibly timely contribution with so many questions today swirling around how people and policy makers both make sense of and imagine sex today.

So the first question is, how exactly did this book come about?

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  Thanks so much for having me and thanks to everyone attending this just for taking some time out of the day to think together and chat together.

This book has a long history and a short history, right? The short history is that 20, I would say 2022, 2023 since I work around human bodies and variation, I do a lot of work around sex and gender and I published a few popular facing articles on this topic.

And the response was enormous, right? But a lot of that response was very negative, a lot was very positive but what I found in the discussions, positive, negative, all around is that a lot of people were jumping to some conclusions or some very robust opinions without having a grasp of what we’re talking about.

What is the shared baseline information? Like, what are bodies like? What is human variation in bodies, what is gender, what is sex, how do we think about these things? How are they related? There is a bunch of knowledge around the world that most people don’t have but they were really quick to jump to, to really conflicting end points.

And so I wanted a better conversation, so I spent about 3 years or so pulling all this information, I already had and really diving deeply into the incredibly rich literature of animal biology, human biology, human sex variation, all of that kind of stuff.

And tried to put it into a fairly concise accessible package that people can have a look at, I don’t care whether people agree with me or not but understanding what’s out there is a baseline.

So to have a better conversation, I offer this book and I hope it helps.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  Mmm-hmm that sounds incredibly interdisciplinary project and so, to do that work, you were drawing from all these fields, why was that important to you to draw from so many realms of knowledge?

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  Well the bottom line is to have this conversation about biology, evolution, you need to know about culture, history, psychology, you need to know about physiology, medical practice, have you to be interested in sports and different ways in which humans use their bodies.

And those things are covered by multiple disciplines, the problem is we tend to think in lines of biology, anthropology or humanity, something like that.

That’s not the way the world works, that is the way universities work, we made up these categories, but the knowledge in the world is much more diverse.

So an interdisciplinary or even trans disciplinary approach to things is central if you want to get a good understanding. Now I won’t go on too long but I do want to emphasize that makes everything more complicated. It’s really hard to sort of deal with all these different literatures and things, so I tried to bring this information and Brent it in a hopefully accessible language so people can get at least get familiar.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  Thanks for the context of how the book came to be and what you were drawing from to tell the story and to help us understand sex.

So this next question is probably the most basic and also the most essential question, so what exactly does it mean for sex to not be a binary? Not simply male or female but on a spectrum?

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  So I will use a visual here because I think this is really important, we need to understand before we can even have this conversation, right? One of those baselines is what is a binary, what is a spectrum, right?

Let’s start with that because most people actually don’t really think about that.

So, oops. Let me… hold on a sec.

Let’s see. Can you all see this?

>> CHIP COLWELL:  Yeah, we’re seeing, it hasn’t started as a presentation yet but seeing.

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  Okay, how’s this?

>> CHIP COLWELL:  Yep, now it is.

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  Okay, great. So this is a binary, a system where you have a category, right, that is share, number in this case, we have a 1 and a 0, a classic binary, these are both numbers of the same category but are completely different entities within that category.

There is no overlap between a 1 and a 0 by definition, they are binary, right? We use this for code and different kinds of things.

So binary, two things in the same category that are wholly distinct from one another. A spectrum and this is a visual representation of an audio spectrum, a spectrum is a distribution of materials, the same materials that varying frequencies or clusters.

So you could have as in this case, two very different clusters all made of the same material within the spectrum and the importance of the spectrum approach is that you can have categories, we have two very different clusters of these same materials here but we also recognize that there are parts of the spectrum that don’t fit /THAO these two clusters that all of these materials have typical patterns and distribution but yet they don’t all always cluster into two /STKEUFRPBLG categoritrum of i

So why is this important for sex? Well, it turns out that everything we have and are made up of are not two distinct kinds, there aren’t two kinds of humans, right, there aren’t two kinds of fence lizards, there aren’t two kinds of McKak monkey, there are versions of these typical clusters of distribution of biological matter that can be very different in some aspects that are not distinct from one another.

So if we think about, let’s say males and females as categories that are quite different in many ways but consist of different distributions and frequencies of the same or similar kinds of materials. That’s actually a really important way to think about this, right?

So your development can divide out into different typical clustering of muscles and bones of ligaments and physiological systems but they’re not distinct from one another.

And some people may think that is a theoretical distinction and not that important but it actually is, a binary is found almost none of the bodies, there are a few, gametes, sperm and egg, two distinct types, pretty much everything else has substantial overlap in physiological function.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  So a follow-up to that. Could you give me an example or two of where we might think of sex as being binary but in fact, it’s on the spectrum whether we’re talking biologically or as we present ourselves through our identities in the world.

You know, just it occurs to me how for so many years you are filling out a government form or that sort of thing, male or female. I think it’s been ingrained in so many of us that it is a binary and it’s one or the other.

If you could give an example, too, break it down a little bit more to explain what that really means.

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  Absolutely. When the government asks, no matter what they say, they are always asking gender, never about sex. I think that is important, your role in society, and the role of context, we can talk about that later. But let’s think about sex, biological dynamics and some major overlap.

Let’s just take the whole body, we tend to think that men are obviously bigger than women, actually on average in a given population, males on average are larger than females but there is enormous overlap about 78 percent, so the high extreme of tall you get way more males, the highest extreme is males and on the lowest extreme are short and primarily females.

But 78 percent is enormous if you use height to determine sex in this population, you would be wrong 7 out of 10 times that is a general overlap. What about specific things?

Men have greater upper body muscular than do women, on average and this is a pretty ubiquitous pattern however nothing in those muscles the cells and bones attached to are distinct but rather different accumulation and processes, right?

So we get different things related to hormonal fluctuation and frequencies that lead to different tissue development and muscular development and there are also cultural things like training, we don’t even know what female bodies what the entire range of upper muscularure is because we have little comparison between males and females as they grow up in training.

Anyway that is another example of overlap not that there aren’t differences but those differences aren’t distinct or kinds rather distributions even something like gonads rather you have testes or ovarieses, those are totally different, gonads from exact same tissue, starting around 6 or 9 weeks of development and really developing 21 weeks or so into different patterns but they frequently, that is ovarieses or testes frequently have tissue material from the other in them like from ovaries or

Or we have two.

The point is typical distributions but not distinct in a binary sense and I can go on and many things in the human body are not binary at all. Hearts, livers, intestines, right? Those don’t come in his or hers format but your heart, lungs, liver are really shaped by your bodily experience as you develop culture, diet, stress, all of those things.

So gendered roles can really influence your organs, even though the organs don’t start out as a male or female kind.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  And since we’ve veered a little bit into the distinction between sex and gender, would you like to just briefly kind of summarize that distinction? Because it’s —

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  One of the things that editor and reviewers pushed back on that I used the term gendered sex in the beginning and throughout. But that is the way it is. Humans are always intertwined completely but for the sake of argument let’s say when talking about, when biologist talk about sex they are talking about the biological material components and when people talk about gender, they usually assume the social roles, sense of identity the way by which you move throughout society an

So you can think of biology in one sense and then sort of the gendered mask Lynne feminine what have you spectrum context but in truth every single human beings knows those two things are linked together and not in a specific predictable way all the time that is what genitals you have don’t predict your sexuality or the degree of your mask lint or femininity, there are correlations and typical patterns but not a one to one thing.

This is really important, for example we know biologically that those that grow up male with testes tend to have a particular kind of jaw line, right? That is closer to 90-degree angle where those with ovaries tend to develop a larger angle and mandible here that is one of the sex differences, I have a large degree with angle, I’m a male grown with testes and I would clearly have the female mandible which is reridiculous, it’s part of the range spectrum of these things and that is the kind of

>> CHIP COLWELL:  Thank you so much. I think that is very clarifying and Edifying and I hope that new term, the way you are using is something caught on because it shows that intersection of biology and culture that is vital to lived experience and just a reminder for everyone we do have the Q&A open so please use that at the bottom of your screen, if you have any questions, I would love to have a few of your questions as well here.

My next one though for you

Agustin and so in your view, what are the repercussions of people and policy makers conceiving of sex as a simple and strict binary.

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  There are a lot of correlates to thinking of sex as binary, males and females two distinct kinds of humans and maleses evolving being for one role and females for another role.

We tend to think of males culturally for protectors of war fare and aggression and females for reproducing and caring for young.

If you assume those are natural roles, those are different kinds then you will make a bunch of assumptions for example the development of families, what is a human family?

We know for example the nuclear family a male and female heterosexual cis individuals and some offspring is not a typical pattern of familiarization globally and even today that is not a typical pattern of residence.

So if you think that the binary is the way humans are that there are males and females and have different trajectories then you will think any other form of familial organization is bad or harmful and we are seeing that in laws being passed in the United States restricting people forming the very things that make us human, this great network of kin, family, and care.

That is one example, another example is medical care, so we know that women are more likely to die in the year after a heart attack than are men.

But we also know that there are no male and female hearts so what is going on? A lot of researchers asking about what is it about the female heart investigating that changes that? The question should be what is the medical system treatment of men and women differently. What is it about gendered experiences of those individuals who are identified or identify as women as they grow up. One of the big gender pattern shaping bodies should be the question but that is not a binary question but  much

And I can go on, sports and development. If we think boys and girls prepuberty are radically different kinds of beings, we treat them that way and develop very different kinds of bodies in part because we don’t let every kid do what we know is healthy psychological and physiologically that is participate in rough and tumble running and playing sports.

Anyways, I can keep going but the binary view is very damaging to our bodies and to society.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  There’s so much at stake which again speaks to the importance of your book.

What is your own story? Do you have any important things that we should know as readers of your work? About you, about how you approach your research or anthropology?

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  Yeah, let me start with one thing when I say there’s not a bianother, I’m not saying men and women, males and females are not different in many important ways, of course, they are.

It’s just that that spectrum approach allows us to sort of see things not as a distinctive kinds of humans but rather the overlap and complexity that is the human experience and I lead with that because my whole training and I was trained sort of traditionally in many ways but doing a lot of fieldwork with humans, with monkeys, with many other mammals, even birds and some reptiles, and stamat pods [phonetic] I worked with mantle shrimp which is fantastic and working across species and workingi

really illustrated to me that most organisms including students don’t read textbook because they do not behave the way they’re suppose to and why is that? What is going on?

And that is why in the bio I’m interested in the big picture and the small things that make us tick because I’m really fascinated with complexity because everything is complicated there are no simple answer to these things.

So starting the at complexity something like to do. It starts party conversations with small talk.

So what should you know about me is that I think that any good answer is drawing from multiple disciplines that probably takes a certain baseline understanding of things.

And that we need to do work to understand stuff. Having said that, you need to also understand one of my goals is to take all of this complex knowledge and work that’s here in the ivory tower, right? In the academy and try to translate it in some way that makes it more accessible that doesn’t  “dumb”  it down but rather opens it up to the public and for the populace and here shout out to the online magazine sapiens for doing that kind of stuff, right?

This is how we share knowledge because knowledge cannot just be about peer reviewed articles.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  So we have a few questions popping into our Q&A. So thank you for those.

So let’s turn to the first one. How do you think about the use of male, female binaries in archeology, forensic analysis of human remains?

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  So I would say right now forensic anthropologist and bio archeologyist are really at the front of pointing out methodology and theoretically how complicated and varied actual material remains are and how we make much more refined bio culturally models to understand these kinds of things.

So bio cultural anthropologist, sorry, bio archeologist and forensic anthropologist lead into this bio cultural notion when we look at a bone, a bone is not just a material remain, a bone is representative of one, the range of human variation. Right? And that could be mix. And two, the lives of the individual in which we are finding only a piece of them.

And so, this integration is really important, and so while traditionally, I was taught sort of forensic and anatomical engagement in a very binary fashion but when I had tons of crane yeah, right? That I was working on or a bunch of femurs, I realized these things overlap way more and the fields of bio archeology and anthropology are pushing this better understanding of the complexity.

Now has that reached the broader public? No. Because when you watch a forensic show or something like, they get DNA in 2 minutes and tell us anything from a skull fragment. So that’s not true.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  The next question, let’s draw from the audience as well. Has there been any differences in the male female brain that can be used to prove gender identity is also physiological?

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  I will flip that question around I will first answer morphology, biology and morphology a huge debate about this I highly recommend to read meth analysis overview — published an article that looked at thousands of samples and multiple studies. The bottom line is that there are a few varied pattern male and female, not gender but biology.

Female female differences very small if you look at the variants in our brain, sectionally male and female related, 1 percent variation that explain it. That means 99 percent of the variation is explained by — factors.

If you look at boys and girls and men and women across the age from 7-year olds to 13-year olds to 24-year olds to 35-year olds, you will see differences in brain function across that time in response to different stimulus, that’s gender. That is the culturation, the body.

So the way the brain works responds to the context and embodiment of life and patterns experienced. So we can see gendered possibilities in the brain but that is really interesting because it doesn’t always connect to what we consider biological patterns like genitals or chromosomes or gonads, it’s associated with self sense of masculinity or feminist or different kinds of roles in genderality.

It’s great data and a lot of debate but it’s clear there are not male and female brains.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  So we’re well-past our 5 question framing for our discussion but this is so interesting and the questions are pouring in here.

So let’s see if we can get a few more if we could before our time is up. I think this might be a common question for a lot of folks are there any ways to determine anything about the sex gender spectrum from current DNA or ancient DNA analysis?

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  Absolutely, both ancient DNA and ancient proteins can tell us about the distributions to the body. Whether someone is XX or XY, or whatever the variance in their 23 chromosome that can tell us something about predicting typical body development whether or not we can find evidence of the many genes associated with both testicular and ovarian development can tell us something.

Whether or not we can scrape ancient proteins from teeth and find the representative of X or Y chromosomes, that’s another thing that tells us a lot.

Does that tell us the gender sex and the life experience of the organism? No but it’s something. Like when we’re working with fossil or even recently deceased remains, we need whatever we can get.

So it doesn’t give us the whole picture but it clearly gives us a starting point to think about the possibility, the trajectories and experiences of those bodies.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  And another question that’s come up for me a lot and I see also varying in our Q&A here is around politics of the moment and thinking about gender and sex and how it plays out in our world and this question is, any thoughts about the why of the emotional aggressive blow back in many cases that comes with discussions like this of the sex spectrum, in other words why does this understanding threaten some people so much?

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  Well this, a few minutes I will do my best here but two things to keep in mind one is there is a concurrent by the current US administration and by many many people especially in the UK and other places to use this notion, a very incorrect notion of biology and of history and culture to attack highly vulnerable very, very minority population.

That is people who are at high-risk quite vulnerable and to translate that into political power to develop a sense of extreme othering and to use that extreme othering to further notions of control and power and we can get into that much more I think that is really important.

The flip side of this, though, I think is also that a lot of people realized that sex and gender are very complex things and many people know someone or they themselves feel a little, that they don’t quite fit the expectations, the bodies, their perceptions and sexuality and what have you so there is a lot of fear involved in this.

And so I think those two things, a small subset of people really fighting and being manipulative with power and this sort of endemic reality of confusion about bodies and lives and which is absolutely typical, I want you to remember what it was like to be 13.

But those two things together can create a landscape of fear anger, hate, and distrust and that is what is really, really dangerous right now. The weaponization of the actual variation, important variation of lived experience and embodies in the biology of humans and translating that into a reductive binary approach and hurt.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  Well thank you so much, I know there is a lot more to say and luckily for us you said a lot of it in your book as well.

So I would definitely encourage every one of you to pick up Agustin’s new book. Again there is the discount code in the chat.

Please use that or check it out from your library. You know, get a hold of the book, because it really is a very clarifying read and there is so much to think about it and learn in the book.

So I’ve read it and I strongly endorse it and support everyone, take a look at it and share it with your friends, family, neighbors and those who are, I think, trying to make sense of what’s a very complex part of the human experience but a really important part of it.

I might also —

>> AGUSTIN FUENTES:  Can I jump in really quickly for 30 seconds, please do that and please talk about this. The worse thing we can do is not have these discussions, to not talk, to not think, to not try to share information that is when we lose and that is when fear and hate win and so having the common understanding, whether you disagree or agree is not the point the point is to try to share information and try to listen to other people.

>> CHIP COLWELL:  Absolutely. So thank you for taking the time to be with us. Thanks to all of you who are out there listening and learning.

I’m sorry we couldn’t get to all of your questions but I’m glad we could get to at least some of them if you /SKWROEUD this event please join us for the next one, which is August 6th I also put the link in the chat with Sarah McKen zer thanks for being here and thank you,

Agustin Fuentes, everyone take care and have a wonderful day.