Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex

This book surprised and appalled me. Surprised because I didn't realize how subjective determining a person's sex is - the baby is born, the doctor takes a look, and then makes a declaration of boy or girl. Appalled because if a baby isn't easily identified as boy or girl in that look, the baby is probably in for a lifetime of surgeries and medical humiliations that are completely unnecessary health-wise but make the doctors feel better because they "fixed" a "problem".

Such a great book. I highly recommend it to everyone, but especially people who are going to have children so that they'll be better informed of the history and prepared for the doctors' b.s. pressures if they have an intersex child.

Dreger interweaves a thoughtful discussion of modern definitions of gender and sex as she tells the story of how “medical men” from France and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century struggled with the definition of sex in their increasing encounters with “hermaphrodites,” people whose biology didn’t fit the normal expectations for either men or women. She provides helpful context for the reasons why these doctors sought to draw hard boundaries when there were none, offering a relatively gracious critique while most certainly enjoying her ability to label medical eras with names such as “The Age of the Gonads.” In her final pages, Dreger is not nearly as forgiving when it comes to our own times, where, show more she argues that “in spite of all the cultural changes that have occurred” the medical profession continues to be “largely driven by the engines that drove it in the nineteenth century,” forcing intersexed bodies into a conformity that is driven largely by a desire for “clarity”, often even to the detriment of health.

The subject matter here is very much focused on the medical aspect to sex/gender without providing the personal and psychological descriptions of such historical people. Dreger explains that this is simply because of the lack of data from the time period she covers - only recently have intersexed people themselves had a voice, leaving a gap then in the history as to the feelings and experiences of the very people under scrutiny.

For those readers who are not interested in the history per se, but in the current state of medical affairs and definitions, the sections of most interest are the prologue (1-14) which provides a context for why definitions of sex should be re-visited and questioned, “current-day explanations and typing” & “question of frequency” (35-45), and the epilogue (167-201), which gives some short biographical sketches and talks extensively about modern-day medical procedures on infants of sex/gender “fitting”. show less