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Impossible Hermaphrodites: Intersex in America, 1620–1960
Elizabeth Reis
| In 1840 the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal published an article about a purported hermaphrodite who had lived some years as male and some as female. The author, a physician, described the subject's ambiguous features: long, black hair arranged in a "feminine mode," a face with "masculine coarseness" but with "a feminine complexion," facial hair like a man, but earrings like a woman. Rumor had it that s/he performed the copulative functions of either sex. Despite the ambiguity of indicators, the doctor expressed no doubt about his subject's sex and portrayed "him" as unequivocally disingenuous, as the perpetrator of a "case of imposture." Although the individual presented herself as female, the doctor pronounced her male.1 |
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What are we to make of this perplexing person? Was she a woman attired in men's clothes, as so many supposed and she herself insisted? Was she truly a man, equipped with "male organs entire," as two doctors observed? Did the "piece of dead flesh" she referred to on her body make her female or male?2 Why did she variously live life as a woman or a man? Why did the doctor feel entitled to pronounce her male, even as she presented herself as female? |
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This essay explores the changing definitions and perceptions of "hermaphrodites" from the colonial period to the early twentieth century.3 Over the course of the three centuries, most medical observers would have agreed that hermaphrodites did not exist in the human species and that patients with confused or ambiguous external and internal reproductive organs were not really hermaphrodites, but cases of "mistaken sex." Indeed, by the mid-twentieth century, "corrective" surgery for such anatomical ambiguity became routine in this country, to make infants' genitalia look "normal" and match their supposed "true sex." But this essay is concerned less with the medical history of surgical procedures or the professional history of doctors than with the cultural history of how American doctors and laypeople regarded bodies and identities that fell outside their conceptual boundaries of normal female and male categories. What did it mean to be male or female? Who had authority to answer that question, and what were the criteria? The essay is organized chronologically as well as thematically, for the classification of hermaphrodites, impossible though the status was thought to be, changed over time. Each section explores the evolving determination of the biological and social foundations of sexual identity and the anxiety, expressed differently in different eras, over those cases that did not fit the ideal bipolarity. |
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Alice Domurat Dreger, in her pathbreaking book, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, has termed the years 1871–1915 the "age of gonads" in France and England. By the late nineteenth century, European doctors argued that "true hermaphrodites" were those whose bodies (examined during autopsies) contained both ovarian and testicular tissue. All others, despite unusual conformations of external genitalia, were labeled as mostly female or mostly male (male pseudohermaphrodites or female pseudohermaphrodites), and hence the two-sex system could remain largely intact. I argue that in the United States the impetus to maintain a two-sex system increased in the late nineteenth century, though it began earlier.4 Before the technology required to analyze ovarian and testicular tissue developed, doctors focused on visual markers, particularly the penis and clitoris, though sometimes the vagina, uterus, and menstruation were offered as proof of womanhood. When biological cues proved inconclusive, medical men turned to social indicators—such as a person's mannerisms, clothing, or tastes—to make their determination of sex definitive. |
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