March 28th

HIS202 Gender Science Lecture

Last lecture:
Professional science investment moves from investment in race to investment against race in the 20th
century

Key: There was a social, cultural, ideological and political shift in the mid 20th century

Last lecture: Mid century Critique of Natural Kinds

“This morning-ness”– A point worth emphasizing.
- Reconceptualization of the science world since the late 18th century (reading bodies).
- What scientists do – changes of scientific practices.
- Mid 20th century, shift from (turn their intention to data)
- Much more about the visual practices.
- A real investment, more important, generally more “output”
- Generating outputs
- Scientists – worked really hard to forget what they came up before (from the 18th century).

Today:
Sex as biological category?
- Just as there emerged new ways of forming anti-racist arguments…
- There were new ways of arguing against naturalness of male-female spirit.

Last week:
- 1. Work of Mead and cultural anthropologists
- 2. Mid century debates over race

In the early 20th century:

The term “sex” covered a range of phenomena
- Signified male and female (in a biological sense)
- Traits, attitudes, and behaviors associated with men and women
- Erotic acts (sex itself, sexuality)

Despite pliability of the term (this word sex):

- Most experts adhered to biological determinism:
- Traits known as masculine and feminine said to spring from the biological processes that
divided male and female.

How sexed bodies came into being

(The male and female division):
- 18th culture of classification
- Victorian male scientists perceived women’s bodies to be “feminine” down to the last details.

Until quite recently:

- sex-gender-sexuality were often confused or conflated (even with the sciences)
- Not yet understood or defined as separate domains of scientific study.
Middle of the 20th century
- Various experts begin to disentangle “Sex” into several separate domains of study and analysis

There which was formerly called “sex” became three things:

- “Biological Sex” : Chromosomes, genes, genitals, hormones, and other physical markers;
(many of which can be modified)
- “Gender” – comes to discuss masculinity, feminity, and the behaviors commonly associated
with them.
- “Sexuality”: Erotic urges, fantasies, behaviors.

That once called SEX becomes three domains.

Physiological
Psychological
Sexual

How to see this split in the conversation?

Archive: Educational Firms

Readings:
- Show us qualities that sexed bodies acquired in the early 20th century.
- Key: Saw efforts to pin down at molecular level what makes a male or a female.

Key: concept of hormones

- Definition: chemical messengers that regulate physical processes in living organisms.
- Initially thought to originate only in sex
- Hormones initially conceptualized as chemical messengers of masculinity and femininity (eg.
“What makes a man a man”)
- Idea of sex hormones arguably the culmination of a particular medical vision of the sexed body
(the one we’ve been following)
- Sex hormones traveling through one’s blood meant all organs and functions shaped by sex.

First half of the 20th century:

- Learn how to extract hormones from the organs and urine of animals (1910s and 1920s)
- Develop chemical tests for detecting the presence of specific hormones (1930s).
- Example: estrogen production in stallion tastes.
- Also becomes clear hormones produced in other glands (e.g. adrenal; pituitary)
- Ultimately: realized what controls one’s “sex” is relative proportion of different hormones.

Oudshorn:
- Introduction of hormones produced

In the early 20th century:

- Sex becomes a question of causality: an effect of the mechanisms that regulate the development
of an organism into a male or female.
- Chemically speaking, all organisms both male and female.
State at its strongest:
- Scientists could claim impossible to simply classify a person as fully male or female.
- Comes to be understood that manipulation of hormones could literally after sex itself.

Mid-20th century:
- Emergences of contemporary sex change procedures
- Sex changes involve essentially two interventions:
o 1st Hormonal
o 2nd Genitals

Surgery before 20th century

- Any modification of sex generally a process of removal
- Example: Castration
- WWI and WWII: advances in plastic surgery
- War is such a significant factor in development of medicine
- Tremendous number of 20th century “advances” linked to the world wars.
- 1950s: a contemporary se change procedures
- Plastic surgeons turned to sex organs in postwar period.
- Both hormones and genitals understood to be newly alterable with surgery and treatment
- However, to become female “easier” than to become male.
- Reached popular consciousness in the media spectacle of Christine Jorgensen
- New York Daily News (1952): “Ex-Gl Becomes Blond Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx
Youth.”
- Media circulated “before and after” photos, re-printed letter written by Jorgensen to her parents;
emphasized juxtaposition of Gl to Starlet.
-

First half of the 20th century:

- Plastic surgery becomes a recognized medical specialty
- Procedures popularized in the mainstream press: 1930s and 1950s.
- Briefly became “the most –talked about girl in the world.”
- In fact: limits of 1952 medicine; Jorgenson underwent electrolysis, hormone injections, and
removal of the penis and testicles (did not have constructed vagina)
- Interesting: went from celebrity to outcast in just months.
o Dec 1952, “leggy bombshell”
o By Spring 1953, re-framed as medical oddity and spectacle
o Key: adult sex change (e.g. Jorgensen) considered a kind of deviancy.

Key: Within popular culture and within the sciences

- For instance, endocrinologists often viewed transsexual surgeries as a “temporary” solution
until later medical advances.

Adult changes made to be marginal or deviant

- But at the same time: infants came to be seen as legitimate site for working through surgical and
hormonal treatments pertaining to sex
- In this growing study of infants that “gender” concept emerges.
Key figure: John Money
Johns Hopkins University

- Interested in the psychological development of identity, studied cases of intersex infants.

- Definition of “intersex”: a term used for a variety of conditions in which biological sex
indeterminate.
- But: Money recognized biology does not always adhere to the strict differences between Male
and Female desired by American culture.
- In other words: whether one thought of themselves as a boy or girl was irrespective of
biological sex
- In 1955: Money began using “gender” to draw distinction between the demain of biological
“sex” and social roles of men and women.
- Gender an old term from linguistics to categorize nouns. However, had never been used in
social sciences.
- From 1920s onward, Margaret Mead and others had argued that “sex roles” varied across
cultures.
- This concept of socially-learned “psychological sex” foreshadowed the concept of gender that
emerges in 1950s.
- “All those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of
man or woman…”
- But gender is not open-ended; a psychological process acquired within narrow window of first
18th months of life.
- Once set, gender could not be altered without severe trauma.

In short:
- Gender said to be“fixed” in early life.
- Unconventional gender identification said to result in unhappiness and mental illness.
- Compared to a “native language”
- Emphasis on learning and conditioning; “continuous multiplicity of signs”
- Following Money’s work, “gender” (gender identity and gender roles) quickly became a
subject of much scientific and medical study.
- Most people said to be “gender congruent”: gender identity, gender role, and symbolic
expression are harmonious.

By 1960s: proliferation of “Gender Identity Clinics”

- Surgically and harmonically alter the biological sex of infants (and adult transsexuals)
- Behavior modification treatments developed
- Create tests to measure gender
- Gender became something to be diagnosed
- Examples: sissy boy syndrome; tomboyism; gender dysphoria
- Because of supposed need for mind & body harmony, quick intervention advocated.
- Question: What was happening to “sex” as gender began to attain this new existence?
- Answer: Sex became “merely biological” domain that was considered outside.
- In other words: Sex and gender became two distinct domains.
- Sex became a biological phenomenon of chromosomes, hormones, and genitals “easily” altered
by the injections of endocrinologists and the scalpers of surgeons.
- Gender became a phenomenon of socialization development, and identity for the study of
psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists.
Politics of nature and nurture inverted:
- Sex becomes something alterable while gender understood to be something fixed in early life.
- In other words, biology alterable, while gender (culture) hard to change.
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