As biology emerged as an organized discipline during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it gradually acquired greater authority over the disposition of ambiguous bodies.19 Nineteenth-century scientists developed a clear sense of the statistical aspects of natural variation,20 but along with such knowledge came the authority to declare that certain bodies were abnormal and in need of correction.21 The biologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire played a particularly central role in recasting scientific ideas about sexual difference. He founded a new science, which he dubbed teratology, for the study and classification of unusual births. Saint-Hilaire and other like-minded biologists set out to study all anatomical anomalies, and they established two important principles that began to guide medical approaches to natural variation. First, Saint-Hilaire argued that ‘‘Nature is one whole’’22—that is, that even unusual or what had been called ‘‘monstrous’’ births were still part of nature. Second, drawing on newly developed statistical concepts, he proclaimed that hermaphrodites and other birth anomalies resulted from abnormal embryonic development. To understand their genesis, he argued, one must understand normal development. Studying abnormal variations could in turn illuminate normal processes. Saint-Hilaire believed that unlocking the origins of hermaphrodites would lead to an understanding of the development of sexual difference more generally. This scientific transposition of the old mythic fascination with hermaphrodites has remained, to this day, a guiding principle of scientific investigation into the biological underpinnings of sex/ gender roles and behaviors of nonintersexuals. (See chapters 3 and 4 for a discussion of the modern literature.)
Saint-Hilaire’s writings were not only of importance to the scientific community, they served anew social function as well. Whereas in previous centuries, unusual bodies were treated as unnatural and freakish, the new field of teratology offered a natural explanation for the birth of people with extraordinary bodies.23 At the same time, however, it redefined such bodies as pathological, as unhealthy conditions to be cured using increased medical knowledge. Ironically, then, scientific understanding was used as a tool to obliterate precisely the wonders it illuminated. By the middle of the twentieth century, medical technology had ‘‘advanced’’ to a point where it could make bodies that had once been objects of awe and astonishment disappear from view, all in the name of ‘‘correcting nature’s mistakes.’’24
The hermaphrodite vanishing act relied heavily on the standard scientific technique of classification.25 Saint-Hilaire divided the body into ‘‘sex segments,’’ three on the left and three on the right. He named these zones the ‘‘profound portion,’’ which contained ovaries, testicles, or related structures; the ‘‘middle portion,’’ which contained internal sex structures such as the uterus and seminal vesicles; and the ‘‘external portion,’’ which included the external genitalia.26 If all six segments were wholly male, he decreed, so too was the body. If all six were female, the body was clearly female. But when a mixture of male and female appeared in any of the six zones, a hermaphrodite resulted. Thus, Saint-Hilaire’s system continued to recognize the legitimacy of sexual variety but subdivided hermaphrodites into different types, laying the groundwork for future scientists to establish a difference between ‘‘true’’ and ‘‘false’’ hermaphrodites. Since the ‘‘true’’ hermaphrodites were very rare, eventually a classification system arose that made intersexuality virtually invisible.
In the late 1830s, a physician named James Young Simpson, building on Saint-Hilaire’s approach, proposed to classify hermaphrodites as either ‘‘spurious’’ or ‘‘true.’’ In spurious hermaphrodites, he wrote, ‘‘the genital organs and general sexual configuration of one sex approach, from imperfect or abnormal development, to those ofthe opposite,’’ while in true hermaphrodites ‘‘there actually coexist upon the body of the same individual more or fewer of the genital organs.’’27 In Simpson’s view, ‘‘genital organs’’ included not only ovaries or testes (the gonads) but also structures such as the uterus or seminal vesicles. Thus, a true hermaphrodite might have testes and a uterus, or ovaries and seminal vesicles.
Simpson’s theory presaged what the historian Alice Dreger has dubbed the Age of Gonads. The honor of offering definitive powers to the gonads fell to a
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Pseudohermaphrodites True Hermaphrodites
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figure 2. 2 : “Pseudo-hermaphrodites’’ have either ovaries or testes combined with the ‘‘opposite’’ genitalia. ‘‘True hermaphrodites’’ have an ovary and a testis, or a combined gonad, called an ovo-testis.
(Source: Alyce Santoro, for the author)
German physician named Theodor Albrecht Klebs, who published his ideas in 1876. Like Simpson, Klebs contrasted ‘‘true’’ with what he called ‘‘pseudo’’- hermaphrodites. He restricted the term true hermaphrodite to someone who had both ovarian and testicular tissue in h/her body. All others with mixed anatomies—persons with both a penis and ovaries, or a uterus and a mustache, or testes and a vagina—no longer, in Klebs’s system, qualified as true hermaphrodites. But if they were not hermaphrodites, what were they? Klebs believed that under each of these confusing surfaces lurked a body either truly male or truly female. Gonads, he insisted, were the sole defining factor in biological sex. A body with two ovaries, no matter how many masculine features it might have, was female. No matter if a pair of testes were nonfunctional and the person possessing them had a vagina and breast, testes made a body male. The net result of this reasoning, as Dreger has noted, was that ‘‘significantly fewer people counted as ‘truly’ both male and female.’’28 Medical science was working its magic: hermaphrodites were beginning to disappear.
Once the gonads became the decisive factor (figure 2.2), it required more than common sense to identify an individual’s true sex. The tools of science— in the form of a microscope and new methods of preparing tissue for microscopic examination—became essential.29 Rapidly, images of the hermaphrodite’s body disappeared from medical journals, replaced by abstract photographs of thinly sliced and carefully colored bits of gonadal tissue. Moreover,
as Alice Dreger points out, the primitive state of surgical techniques, especially the lack of anesthesia and antisepsis, at the end of the nineteenth century meant that doctors could obtain gonadal tissue samples only after death or castration: ‘‘Small in number, dead, impotent—what a sorry lot the true hermaphrodites had become!’’30 People of mixed sex all but disappeared, not because they had become rarer, but because scientific methods classified them out of existence.
At the turn of the century (1896, to be exact), the British physicians George F. Blackler and William P. Lawrence wrote a paper examining earlier claims of true hermaphroditism. They found that only three out of twenty — eight previously published case studies complied with the new standards. In Orwellian fashion, they cleansed past medical records of accounts of hermaphroditism, claiming they did not meet modern scientific standards,31 while few new cases met the strict criterion of microscopic verification of the presence of both male and female gonadal tissue.