Fausto-Sterling later said she was writing ‘with tongue firmly in cheek’. And yet anyone who has taken gender studies in the past two decades will almost certainly have been assigned her essay, and it is taken inexplicably seriously. So entrenched is the ‘five sexes’ claim that Googling ‘how many sexes are there’ turned up ‘five’ as the top answer until the search algorithm was tweaked in response to complaints.
