One-Sex, Two-Sex, or …?: Thinking About the Sexed Body in History

Historian Thomas Lacquer’s 1992 Making Sex argues that the one sex model dominated ancient and medieval medicine and popular ideas of sex, until, approximately, the Enlightenment, which gradually dispelled the one sex model in favor of the two-sex model–the strict dimorphic binary of sex, male and female, that most people are probably familiar with today. While numerous historians, and particularly historians of the ancient and medieval periods, have challenged the scope and specifics of Lacquer’s thesis, the revolution in gender history that his work prompted is undeniable. To kick off this series on Bodies, we’re going to talk about the history of how sex – or the meaning and value ascribed to genitals – was socially and scientifically constructed and reconstructed in Europe over the last two thousand years.

One-Sex, Two-Sex, or …?: Thinking About the Sexed Body in History Transcript

Written by Averill Earls, PhD

Produced by Averill Earls and Marissa Rhodes, PhD

Marissa: In 1543, the Italian anatomist Andreas Vesalius published a collection of illustrations intended to highlight the works of the second century Asia Minor physician Galen of Pergamon. One was drawn to illustrate Galen’s controversial idea that female reproductive organs were simply the inverse of male, with the vagina an outside-in penis, the uterus an inverted scrotum, the female testes (or ovaries, as we’d call them now) made to resemble floating male testes, and the labia drawn to look like foreskin. To modern viewers, this illustration looks ridiculous. But to some physicians and philosophers in the late medieval and early modern period, this illustration spoke to a particular way of conceptualizing “sex” and a cosmological understanding of the human body. For several centuries, some scientists proposed and believed that there was only one “sex”, and that the difference between “male” and “female” was only a matter of difference in location of genitals. For about 50 years in the 16th century, it was a very popular idea of the human body. In this “one sex” model of understanding human anatomy, female genitals, which were inside, were an imperfect manifestation of reproductive material, the result of insufficient heat in the womb or underdevelopment.

Averill: Historian Thomas Lacquer’s 1992 Making Sex argues that the one sex model dominated ancient and medieval medicine and popular ideas of sex, until, approximately, the Enlightenment, which gradually dispelled the one sex model in favor of the two-sex model–the strict dimorphic binary of sex, male and female, that most people are probably familiar with today. While numerous historians, and particularly historians of the ancient and medieval periods, have challenged the scope and specifics of Lacquer’s thesis, the revolution in gender history that his work prompted is undeniable. To kick off this series on Bodies, we’re going to talk about the history of how sex – or the meaning and value ascribed to genitals – was socially and scientifically constructed and reconstructed in Europe over the last two thousand years.

I’m Averill Earls

And I’m Marissa Rhodes

And we are your historians for this episode of Dig

Marissa: We want to thank all of our Patreon supporters, and especially our fabulous Auger and Excavator level patrons: Lisa, Karl, Karen, Jessica, Maria, Denise, Edward, Lauren, Colin, and Susan! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you’re not yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more

Averill: Before we begin we want to acknowledge that all the work we do on this show relies on the work of other historians. As you might’ve guessed, Thomas Lacquer’s book Making Sex is the focus of this episode, but perhaps more important to our purposes today are the works of his critics. Helen King, Karen Harvey, Joan Cadden, and various other scholars of ancient Greece, medieval and early modern Europe raise important critiques of Lacquer’s one-sex thesis. Marissa is an expert in the 18th century European body, and I am excited to have her on the episode today. Lacquer takes on quite the temporal task with his thesis; these scholars temper and offer nuance to his broader claims. So thanks to everyone doing the work to make History – our discipline – an on-going and fascinating conversation.

Marissa: The genesis for Lacquer’s book came from his early career investigations into the history of the life cycle, during which he consulted 16th and 17th century midwifery books. In those texts – and numerous others, well into the 18th century – Lacquer discovered that among medical professionals, philosophers, and commoners, people believed that conception required that both man and woman orgasm so that each could release the seed of life. Before we developed a more complex understanding of human reproductive anatomy and the role and function of ovaries or the uterus, folks had a sort of rudimentarily correct framework for conception. The sperm and the egg, material from both man and woman, are indeed required. The emphasis on both male and female orgasm to achieve the release of that material, though, was quite surprising to Lacquer, who had both his modern notions about reproduction and the popular and scientific beliefs of the 19th century people he studied – none of which tied female orgasm explicitly to reproduction. Further, by the 19th century, scientists and doctors were trying to argue that female passivity was ‘natural’ and that the only active agent in reproduction was the male seed – the one seed theory of reproduction – which grew inside the passive female host’s body. Finding the dual orgasm model, and the two-seed model, in his early research surprised Lacquer, and drove him to look closer.

Averill: Building off the two-seed / one-seed theories that floated around European medical and scientific communities, Lacquer was even more surprised to discover a peculiar (to modern sensibilities) ancient/medieval/early modern conception of the sexed body. Lacquer argued that from ancient times until sometime between the 17th and 18th centuries, Europeans “popularly” believed that the two genders originated from but one sex, and that difference was “by degree rather than kind.” His primary sources for this understanding of the body were drawn from two key individuals: Galen of Pergamon’s writings about sex and reproduction, and Aristotle’s philosophical pondering on the same. He draws on a number of early modern anatomists’ works, including Gaspard Bauhin of Basel (1560-1624), William Harvey of England (1578-1657), Charles Estienne of France (1504-1564), and John Dryander of Germany (1500-1560), who all (as historian Helen King points out) assembled their models from Galen’s original anatomical writings.^[1]

Marissa: Galen wrote: “Think first, please of the man’s [external genitalia] turned in and extending between the rectum and the bladder. If this should happen, the scrotum would necessarily take the place of the uterus with the testes lying outside, next to it on either side.” … “Think too, please of…the uterus turned outward and projecting. Would not the testes [ovaries] then necessarily be inside it? Would it not contain them like a scrotum? Would not the neck [the cervix and vagina], hitherto concealed inside the perineum but now pendant, be made into the male member?”^[2]

Averill: Galen, as historian Helen King points out, pontificated about the sexed body in many of his writings – as did many medical writers of his time and in the centuries after – and his writings are often contradictory or at least inconsistent. He isn’t making clear or defining statements; he’s asking readers to “imagine” the female organs as the male turned inside out. In fact, Galen argued, “you could not find a single male part left over that had not simply changed its position.” (Interestingly, he did not say the converse – of course there are female reproductive components that have no clear analogy or equal in the male, ie the clitoris, the fallopian tubes, etc.)^[3] For Galen (and most premodern scientists), the male was the default so everything female was interpreted through our knowledge of the male.

Marissa: While the popularity of Galen’s theory should not be overstated, it is certainly true that his influence was traceable from the ancient world to the medieval. Using some 50+ anatomical illustrations from the 15th through the 17th centuries which seem to replicate the imagined inversion of the male/female reproductive system, Lacquer certainly proves that there were scientists and physicians who imagined this vertical hierarchy of human anatomy. He also discusses the various scholars of the early modern period who challenged the absurdity of the inverted genitals – a conversation (albeit primarily among elite men and their pupils) that suggests the persistence of the one-sex model against which they needed to argue. Renaldus Columbus’ “discovery” of the clitoris, for example, proved both a muddling and reinforcing conundrum. Was it the analog to the penis, or was it the “shaft” of the vagina? Could she have two penises, then? If the clitoris was on the outside, then the simple inversion model would not work any more. These debates cycled among medical writers as they sought to place human bodies within the context of their pre-existing world views.

Averill: The one sex theory of the body was connected to – or maybe even an outgrowth of – two other key medical concepts. First, humoral medicine. Marissa did a whole episode on Humoral medicine, so for an in-depth look at that, I recommend you go check that out. Some iteration of the humoral theory of medicine was kicking around Eurasia since 3,000 BCE; for Europeans, the Greeks – particularly Galen and Hippocrates, and their associated textual corpus – created, in effect, a standard theory of the body that focused on the four vital fluids, or humors: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. Every person had a particular humoral constitution or “complexion” and a healthy person required the proper balance of their humoral fluids. Ancient and early modern Europeans looked to the humoral balance of the body to explain all ailments, temperaments, and pretty much everything body-related. Each of the humors were connected to temperatures and natural elements. Yellow bile = hot, dry, fire, summer. Blood = hot, wet, spring, air. Phlegm = wet, cold, water, winter. Black bile = dry, cold, earth, autumn. You had to keep these liquids balanced. If you had a fever or other inflammations, doctors would probably diagnose you with an excess of blood, and put the leeches to you. But mostly they’d recommend changes to your diet and to your exercise habits, or maybe some herbal remedies intended to restore those balances.

Marissa: A holistic approach to medicine was essential, and humorally-informed physicians and scientists understood the human body as part of a larger cosmos. In addition to the balance of the vital fluids of your body, your health might be impacted by the waxing and waning moon, the alignment of the planets, or the weather. Bodies and health were shaped by too much heat or cold, too much dryness or wetness. Within this theory, a one-sex body made sense. In effect, the idea was that in utero, a fetus that didn’t receive enough heat would not be able to fully form, and so would emerge with the sex characteristics of a girl, with genitals still inside the body. A fetus that was sufficiently heated would push out its genitals and become a fully formed human: aka, (eventually), a man. The perfect/imperfect manifestation of reproductive genitals in this process just about makes sense.

Averill: The other element that supported the one-sex theory was the belief in the “two seed” model of conception. But like the one-sex body theory, the two-seed theory was both historically contingent and hotly contested. The three key texts of Galen’s that Lacquer relies on for his investigation of the ancient theories of the body are On the Usefullness of the Parts of the Body, On Seed, and On the Natural Faculties. On Seed is the core text of the two-seed theory of conception.

Marissa: Ancient and early modern European peo ple believed that both man and woman needed to contribute seed to the creation of a new life, and that those seeds were expelled upon orgasm. Effectively, for centuries, Europeans believed that female orgasm was just as necessary for conception as male orgasm. This is obviously not true – and there was certainly evidence to the contrary – but the evidence to the contrary, which would have been experienced by women and not necessarily seen by male physicians or scientists, was not really recorded in official anatomical or medical texts. Even the 17th century midwife Jane Sharp followed the Galenic trends set by On Seed, though she undoubtedly encountered evidence to the contrary. However, the concept that man and woman contributed material to the pregnancy supported the idea that there was only one sex, and that the genitals must then be the same because they produced the same material.

Averill: It was within this broader as well as more specific body of medical ‘knowledge’ that Galen proposed the one-sex theory. According to Galen, “If one should think of the female uterus with its double nature as undergoing the following two things, falling forward outside the peritoneum, and at the same time so reversing itself so that all of that is outside comes now to be inside, and what is inside appears now on the outside, he would in this way produce the testicles in the scrotum, the cavity of the uterus having become the scrotum and peritoneum the sheath-like tunic, and the testicles themselves not being outside the uterus, as they are now, but inside.”^[4]  … “Thus both the female and male animal appear to have all their generative parts the same, differing either in position, in that one set of them is inside the peritoneum, the other outside, or in size, as was noted just now in the case of the prepuce and the testicles.”

Marissa: Galen didn’t invent these ideas in a vacuum, of course. The 3rd century medical writer Herophilus was “fundamentally enslaved” to the one-sex model. He insisted that there were  no ‘unique’ female ailments. The 4th century Hippocratic text Diseases of Women argued (obviously) the opposite – that there were a range of maladies specific to women that were not evident or replicable in men, evidence that the two sexes were distinct and separate.^[5] The Hippocratic writer argued that women’s diseases were not like men’s diseases, and that little was known about women’s diseases because of their unease with male doctors.

Averill: So Galen of Pergamon, familiar with the writings of Herophilus, argued (to varying degrees) across his corpus of works on the body that there was just one sex, and women were the outside-in manifestations of that sex. He included these pontifications in at least three of his writings, and the fragments or entiretys of those writings that survived to the medieval, early modern, and modern periods were influential – to varying degrees.

Marissa: One 17th century poem, which Lacquer quotes parts of, reflects the seeming longevity of Galen’s theory. Aristotle’s Masterpiece was a popular midwifery and philosophical work published in 1684. The author remains unidentified, but claimed to be Aristotle himself (even though the man had been dead some thousand years when the book was published), and so it has become one of many texts attributed to “Pseudo-Aristotle,” or works on philosophy purporting to have been written by Aristotle but with no evidence as such. Aristotle’s Masterpiece is a sex manual and guide to childbirth and pregnancy, including such topics as the importance of female pleasure. In some editions the authors/publishers included a poem, written from a man’s perspective, that seems to align with Galenic sex theory:

Thus I the Womens Secrets have survey’d

And let them see how curiously they’re made;

And that, tho’ they of differente Sexes be,

Yet in the Whole they are the same as we:

For those that have the strictest Searchers been,

Find women are but Men turn’d Out-side in:

And Men, if they but cast their Eyes about,

May find they’re Women with their In-side out.^[6]

Averill: Since this is a 17th century poem, do you think that when they ‘searchers’ there, they mean searchers of the dead?

Marissa: Yeah, that’s what they mean there.

Averill: That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure, and you’re the expert, so now that you’re here I wanted to ask you!

Marissa: Right, because that would have been a situation where women would have been inspecting people’s naked bodies, they’re just saying that hey, this is a time when in everyone’s life when their bodies are searched, and these women searchers of the dead are searching for a cause of death for the death certificate, they have free rein, they can just explore this person’s body, and normally that’s not something that women could do with someone who was alive.

Averill: Right, and so this poem is saying that these searchers of the dead, who are women, are looking at other women’s bodies, and might see that women’s bodies are the inside out of the men’s bodies they also get to see in the course of their duties. And then men, who obviously have more freedom to look at people’s bodies, they would already know that.

Marissa: Right, they would always know that, because they can look at those bodies whenever they want.   

Averill: Lacquer quotes from this poem, and leaves off the final couplet. It is possible that the final couplet was not included in the edition of the text that he had access to – Helen King notes that the poem isn’t even in the 1690 or 1694 editions of the text, but did appear in a number of different 18th century editions or similar “collections” of Aristotlean writings. But by not including the last couplet, Lacquer presents a poem that seems to support the idea that men are the primary manifestation of the one sex, and women are “but Men turn’d Out-side in.” The final couplet though, overturns that hierarchy, because “Men, if they but cast their Eyes about, May find they’re Women with their In-side out.” This poem, then, does not really support a one-sex theory of the male as perfection and female as an imperfectly developed human.

Marissa: As King points out, Aristotle himself (insofar as we can be sure he is the author of any of these texts) was pretty firmly in the two-sex camp, though Lacquer chooses to read Aristotle’s writings as indicating his “lukewarm” theoretical support of the one-sex theory. In his Generation of Animals, Aristotle argued that females were deformed. He meant this not in the modern sense of the word deformed, but more in line with something akin to imperfect. Artistotelean thought was replicated in medieval writings not to identify a clear one-to-one symmetry of imperfection in women, but to point out the ‘inadequacy of female anatomy.’^[7]

Averill: In the 16th century, Aristotelean ideas were largely replaced by Galenic, led by scholars like Vesalius. For about a century, medical writers and physicians built on Galen’s ideas, including the one-sex theory. Their work did not supplant or replace the two-sex theory, but existed within a broader medical discourse about the body, how it worked, and increasing study of intricate and heretofore secret inner workings – from circulation to reproduction.

Marissa: In the 18th and 19th centuries European scientists decided, more firmly, that women were not the same or inverse of men, but rather distinct creatures entirely. Rather than being equal contributors to conception, they were passive vessels for the male seed. In some interpretations of the humoral body, women did not have enough heat to turn blood into semen. Some medical writers argued that men deposited the fetus into her waiting womb – rendering women nothing more than an incubator for the male seed. Most one seed theorists – including, in some of his writings, Galen – argued that the woman provided the matter and the male seed provided the form (the plans) for how that matter would be turned into a human.^[8] This played into the idea that men had more intellect and were associated with the mind and women were associated with the mindless body. Women provide the lump of flesh  and men shape it into a human. So males are what makes humans human. It also gave men greater ownership over their children than women which is reflected in the legal systems in patriarchal societies- men get automatic custody of children!

Averill: The two seed theory was, of course, closer to correct than the one seed theory. But, as various historians have suggested, the one seed theory was shaped by ideological shifts in European society. As the Renaissance and Enlightenment provoked discussions about governance, ‘natural born rights,’ and political participation, some women demanded a place in public life. Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, and other philosophers saw themselves as equal to men in capacity if not temperament, and just as capable and valuable in public life as men. They accepted the corporeal distinction – that there were two sexes – but rejected the patriarchal hierarchies that existed in both the one-sex and two-sex models. Meanwhile the policy-makers had their ears cocked in the other direction, accepting as fact the hierarchy of the sexes, whether they ascribed to one-sex or two-sex theories of the body. Texts like Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and Sophie asserted that boys and girls, men and women, are fundamentally different, that they have different “natural” roles in life and society; so too scientists and physicians contributed similar “evidence” to exclude women from public life: their brains too small, their constitutions too weak, their reproductive parts too passive.

Marissa: There are many critiques of Lacquer’s thesis, but we’ll focus on just two today: first, that the one-sex model was not nearly as widespread as he suggests, and second, that his chronology is way off. Neither critique denies that the one sex model carried sway at some point in European history, but both demonstrate that it would be problematic to say unequivocally that there was a period when the one sex theory dominated before a period of great change shifted medical discourse to the two-sex theory. But, as Helen King notes, Lacquer’s work is still important because he disrupts the notion that sex is no less historically contingent than anything else in human history.

Averill: First, as demonstrated by historian Karen Harvey, while the one-sex model of understanding the human reproductive body certainly existed, it was a view of the body that was pretty limited to medical writers, physicians, and other scholars.^[9] The one-sex model of understanding human bodies, then, was limited to the elite, and did not really penetrate into every day language or literature. As historian John Tosh put it, “it is worth pausing to ask whether sexual polarization was anything more than a discursive trope. Did it reflect the reality of relations between men and women?”^[10] Lacquer’s sources are almost exclusively medical texts, and a few poems; his sources don’t include actually popular mediums like erotica and pornography, which of course talk about and depict genitals pretty extensively.^[11] He doesn’t even use Leonardo Davinci’s anatomical drawings, which seems an odd oversight. The specific orientation, shape, and function of reproductive organs wasn’t particularly important to people in a day-to-day sense, other than the sex assigned to babies by priests, parents, or doctors at birth, and even then it was just a matter of what seemed most obvious or prominent (even when it wasn’t).

Marissa: The one sex theory was not a “popular” or “common” conceptualization of the body, even when social and political constructs aligned with the vision of the vertical hierarchy of men and women. In effect, the philosophy behind the one-sex body, that female was an imperfect or underdeveloped manifestation of the male, supported a patriarchal view of the world. In daily life for most of the period Lacquer discusses, in the common and sexual imagination, humanity was divided into two sexes.

Averill: As illustrated by scholars like Helen King and Katy Park, the chronology of “change” from the one-sex to the two-sex model that Lacquer proposes in his book is not really supportable. Park notes that “Before 1500 I could find no convincing expressions of the idea of genital homology at all, even as an alternative to be discarded, except for a few brief passages in the works of several late medieval surgeons.”^[12] Though case stories and illustrations or discussions of Galen’s work were occasionally repeated over the centuries, different historical moments shaped the ways scholars and medical writers interpreted those artifacts.

Marissa: There was not really a clear moment – a “modern turn” – when the one-sex model was supplanted by the two-sex model. Even when the one-sex model carried real weight in elite European medical circles, the two-sex model existed alongside it. And, as Park, King, and others have shown, the one-sex model seemed really limited in its influence to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and perhaps really only 1500-1550. Lacquer wants to argue that this was a mega-influential concept that dominated from the ancient times through the early modern. The sources he relies on – rich for the 16th and 17th centuries, but thin for the preceding and succeeding centuries – simply do not support that stance.

Averill: There were a number of case studies from 4th and 5th century Greek physicians and scholars that became the corpus of European medicine for several centuries, and resuming influence with the reintroduction of Greek works through Avicenna (Ibn Sina), the Persian physician who compiled and translated the Canon of Medicine in the 11th century. One 4th century medical case study, highlighted by Helen King in her book The One Sex Body on Trial, reveals more about the changing medical landscape of Europe over the centuries than about the fluidity of sex in Europe. Phaethousa was a woman who stopped menstruating when her husband was away for a long period of time.

Marissa: Because Hippcrates had significant shaping and staying power in European medicine, Phaethousa’s story was interpreted and reinterpreted over many centuries. King places Phaethousa – and the various interpretations – in context to demonstrate that it is not possible to assert that there was a “standard” sex model, whether one-sex or two-sex, as evidenced by the interpretation and re-interpretation of these Hippocratic case histories that had significant staying power. Some physicians in the Renaissance era, for example, read the transformations of Phaethousa’s body – sprouting hair in masculine places, perhaps developing a penis, depending on one’s reading of the text – as evidence of changing sex, as might be possible within the one-sex model. But most readings of the Phaethousa text, including among the Greco-Roman physicians who recorded the story in the first place, conclude that while “her body’s surface gives one impression to those around her, it is her womb – hidden, but made evident by her previous childbearing – that convinces the Hippocratic physician recording her case that she is a woman, despite the visible changes to her body.”^[13]

Averill: Historians like King and Joan Cadden challenge the pervasiveness of the one-sex model by virtue of their study of the rest of the medieval body. Cadden, for example, found that medieval scientists and physicians believed there were key and distinct differences between male in female in the skull, the brain, body hair and beards, as well as the origin of sexual pleasure (for males, the kidneys, for females, the navel).^[14] King demonstrates that Hippocrates, more than Galen, shaped medical and anatomical conversations from the ancient to the modern. She asserts that “the Hippocratic imperative demanded that the bodies of men and women were treated in different ways when ill; this was not what Galen had suggested.”^[15]

Marissa: Another story King highlights is that of Agnodice. In ancient Athens, women were barred from practicing medicine, but because there were strict honor codes which made it unacceptable for women to be examined by male physicians, women were getting sick and going without treatment needlessly. So Agnodice, a woman, dressed as a man, trained as a physician, and began her practice. When she called on women in need of care, she showed the other women her genitals to demonstrate that she was one of them. Men were convinced that she (as a man) was seducing all these women in Athens, and so put her on trial. When taken to court, she lifted her clothes to show that she is a woman. She is then charged with a different crime – practicing medicine – but the other women of Athens protested her punishment so that the law is changed, and thereafter women “of free birth” were allowed to practice medicine.^[16]

Averill: (I do think the Agnodice story is also interesting in that it differentiates “sex” from gender, or at least gender expression. It was easy for her to “pass” as a man, even though she didn’t have some of the other “normal” markers of a man – specifically a beard or hairyness. Her accusers described her as a smooth-faced interloper, and attributed her seduction to her smooth-facedness – and yet no one seemed any the wiser. Though I am not an expert in 4th century medical literature, in some ways it seems like some scholars might or might have interpreted this case history to tie “sex” to lower reproductive organs, since that is what she used to prove herself to her patients and to get out of being convicted of seduction.)

Marissa: By examining these case histories (and others), we can see the ways early modern medical writers interrogated what constituted “sex,” and particularly whether or not “sex change” was possible. King argues that these two stories demonstrate that there was not a period when the one-sex model “dominated” medicine, while also offering evidence that “sex” was not a simple or immutable binary in the ancient, medieval, or early modern period. In some ways, then, King is testing Lacquer’s thesis, and affirming one of the broader arguments that Lacquer makes about the historical contingency of sex.

Averill: Though a number of scholars have challenged his thesis about the one-sex theory, Lacquer’s remains one of the most influential works on the history of the body.

Marissa: Why was this thesis popular when Lacquer published his book in the 1990s? In the 1990s, gender studies took off – with scholars like Judith Butler and Joan Scott leading the way in questioning the social construction of gender and its meanings at any given historical moment. Lacquer’s thesis, which suggested there was a time when sex – that seemingly immutable, biological determination – was not clearly defined or definable, was a welcome challenge of the binary as we knew it. And even now, with these critiques dismantling some of Lacquer’s broader claims, he was not entirely wrong. In scope, perhaps, and reach, yes, but he found in a number of medical – and some popular – writings from the 15th through the 19th centuries, a different way of conceptualizing the sexed body. His work, and the evidence he presents, is sufficient to disrupt the simplistic and allegedly “natural” order of things.

Averill: There is something really interesting about the one-sex model, too, that students in my 2023 Queer Lives seminar picked up on immediately. If there was only one sex, and “female” was just an imperfect version of that sex, wouldn’t that create space for other variations of “imperfection” that were just as acceptable or normal? Yes and no. As historian Helen King points out, so-called ancient and medieval hermaphrodites, who might today identify as or be identified as intersexed, were accepted and rejected with varying degrees in Europe. Many cultures have long histories of recognized, often sacred, gender or sex continuums or “third-genders”, like the Two Spirit (a modern umbrella term for a diverse set of sex and gender identities in various indigenous American communities) or the Hijras of South Asia. So too in European history there were periods in which “hermaphrodites” were treasured novelties, strange medical anomalies, or something in between. But the intersexed are often a data point that critics of Lacquer use to argue that his thesis doesn’t hold water – that the one-sex theory of the body could not have been widespread or accepted, because there wasn’t really room in these medieval or ancient societies for the acceptance of intersex people. “Hermaphroditism” was not normalized, whereas women were; and since women were, in the one-sex theory, also “imperfect” manifestations of the reproductive system, why wouldn’t other imperfections also be normalized?

Marissa: Fascinatingly, modern science has actually provided new evidence for a one-sex theory of the body. Now we understand genital morphology at a microlevel, in a way that neither Galen nor Hippocrates could have imagined. Gestationally, human fetal development kind of resembles the one sex model in some ways – fetuses all have the same genital tubercle until about 8-10 weeks, and then it differentiates and starts looking more like a penis or vulva. This lends credence to how rational (and almost accidentally correct) Galen was.

Averill: And today, sex – and the ways we categorize people or understand sexual dimorphism – is still contested. Now we know that at least 1.7% of the population are intersex, or born with sex characteristics that don’t fit the binary of male/female. For decades, parents and doctors have made surgical or gender decisions for babies born with “ambiguous” genitals. Intersex people have been fighting for generations now to be acknowledged, to educate the public on why medical decisions should be their own to make or not make, and to have the right to simply exist in this binary-obsessed world. And why are we stuck in this binary still? In Europe and the US, sexuality is popularly depicted as a spectrum; gender too has been troubled for decades now, so that gender identity and expression are no longer simply a restrictive binary. Why not sex too? (I mean, I know why – I have those family members who fight me on every discussion about gender, sex, sexuality, and politics too). But this is why Lacquer’s work – and Butler’s work, and Cadden’s work, and King’s work – are important. They don’t introduce us to a time when the sexed body was seen as a continuum or where intersex people were accepted as a natural variation. What they show us are times when different understandings of the sexed body coexisted and competed, and even brief periods when the one-sex theory dominated medical discourse briefly. Together these works remind us that the meaning we assign to things like genitals is historically contingent, the scientific interpretation of data is historically contingent, and sex is not some immutable binary thing that predetermines who you are or what you are capable of. And hey – that’s also why history matters.

Marissa: It’s really hard to have taken gender studies courses and history of the body courses and have read all of these medical treaties and all of these works by Lacquer and by his critics and so it’s really hard to have read all of those like I have just for having to do for my degree and then have like you know some Joe Blow be like “sex is biological it’s science!” It’s just like, okay, like, I mean I guess your second grade science textbook says that or whatever. But you know it’s actually, as everything is, it’s more complicated.

Averill: So much more complicated

Marissa:  than that and there’s like no reason why we have to try to make it simple. And I will never ever understand what loyalty people have to the gender binary or even a sex binary. Like what has it done for you really? Like I don’t understand I don’t understand why people are so obsessed with that and why they can’t tolerate any departure from that binary. It’s really strange to me. I genuinely do not get it but apparently it’s something that a lot of people hold fast to, you know, and it’s part of their identity, I guess.

Averill: I mean, for women, you know I can understand, because I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who consider themselves radical feminists, and who grew up in time when women had no rights, and so they had to fight for a long time to justify their access to basic things like credit cards and divorce and Reproductive Rights. So tying their identity to this like narrow definition of “woman” means a lot to them, and so I know where TERFs are coming from, basically. I don’t agree with them, obviously, and I think that we’re at a time and a place certainly where women’s rights are still under attack but that’s also because those women are throwing their lot in with with people who are transphobes and who are restricting rights of people generally, especially medical rights. So yeah. But it’s so fascinating. We have this this curriculum now you’re right in like second grade textbooks where we’re teaching children that there’s this dimorphic binary and that’s the be all end all.

Marissa: And we teach them – and I think this is actually changing a little bit. Some of my scientist friends have said that that this is a change that’s happening. People have come to understand science as like as just unmovable, you know, truth that has been proven and it’s cast in stone the end. That’s why doing the history of science and medicine is so important, because that’s how everyone thinks of their science. Galen was like, you know, Yep, this is it! You know he explored things but once he was done writing down all his stuff people would read Galen and be like yep he figured it all out, this is this is a rock solid foundation, let’s build off that. And then they just build off of Galen. So scientists have been doing this where they, you know, assume that that the people before them have gotten it right. I mean what the hell else can they do? You can’t really, I mean what else can you do? You can’t just be like, oh, you can’t really remake the scientific schema every few years, like that doesn’t work either. But I think nowadays there are some people who are working on science communication, who are explaining how real scientists, like actual experimental scientists think about science. They don’t think about science as objective truth, they think about science as a process where you’re constantly testing hypotheses. I saw this a lot with COVID, people were like it’s science! and then the scientists were like …yeah but we don’t have enough data yet. We actually don’t know yet… you know, that kind of thing so. I think in text books that’s how it’s portrayed, like this is black and white, this is science.

Averill: That’s the boiled down of what we think we know right now, and that becomes what the gen pop, how they understand the world.

Marissa: Right, I think it’s a matter of science communication to the general population. Which is an issue. And I’m no scientist, don’t get me wrong, but I know a heck of a lot about historical scientists, and how their scientific process worked. And I’m not arrogant enough to say, oh there’s only two Sexes, it’s biological, or whatever because, like, there’s actually been a lot of evidence that that might not be true. And there’s a lot of evidence in nature that it definitely isn’t true, and who knows, moving forward we might figure out that even biologically that sex is a spectrum. Like our understanding of DNA is in its infancy. Soon we might understand chromosomal science completely differently. So I’m just not arrogant enough to say, oh this is definitely it, and I just think it is very arrogant too when people when people say that, you know, just as arrogant as telling people that you know their gender better than they do you know. That’s bullshit. That’s my soapbox for the day.

Averill: Getting real angry, real fast here kid.

Marissa: I know. This is what living in Florida does to you. Radicalizes you.

Averill: Oh god. Someone has to do it. Thank you for being there to vote. We need ya.

Averill: Thank you for joining us today. As always, we invite you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at dig_history, or join our Facebook group – Dig History Pod Squad. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail! If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. We realize that recent changes to curriculum in states like Florida and Texas will complicate being able to use our podcast episodes in the classroom, so please reach out if there’s something we can do to be helpful to you and your classroom. You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store at digpodcast.org.

---

^[1] Lacquer, Making Sex, 82-97.

^[2] Galen of Pergamon, Qtd. in Lacquer, Making Sex, 25-26.

^[3] Galen of Pergamon, Qtd. in Lacquer, Making Sex, 25-26.

^[4] King, The One-Sex Body on Trial, 36.

^[5] King, The One-Sex Body on Trial, 37-40.

^[6] Qtd. in King, One Sex Body on Trial; from the 1702 edition, Insigne Artificium Aristotelis: or, Aristotle’s Compleat Master-Piece. In Two Parts. Displaying the secrets of nature in the generation of man.

^[7] King, One Sex Body on Trial, 42.

^[8] King, One Sex Body on Trial, 41.

^[9] King, One Sex Body on Trial, 37.

^[10] Qtd. in Karen Harvey, “The Century Of Sex? Gender, Bodies, And Sexuality In The Long Eighteenth Century,” The Historical Journal, 45, 4 (2002), pp. 899–916.

^[11] Harvey, “The Century Of Sex”,

^[12] Qtd in King, The One Sex Body on Trial, 32.

^[13] King, The One Sex Body on Trial, 20.

^[14] Summarized in King, The One Sex Body on Trial, 18.

^[15] King, The One Sex Body on Trial, 18.

^[16] King, The One Sex Body on Trial, 22.

Bibliography

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990).

Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Amber Davy, “An Evolving Conception of Sexual Difference: Evaluating Thomas Laqueur’s Theory on the Emergence of a ‘two-sex model’ in the Eighteenth Century,” Trinity Women’s Review

Karen Harvey, “The Century Of Sex? Gender, Bodies, And Sexuality In The Long Eighteenth Century,” The Historical Journal, 45, 4 (2002), pp. 899–916

Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Routledge, 2013).

Thomas Lacquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1992)

Elizabeth Reis, Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex (John Hopkins Press, 2021)

Elizabeth Reis, “Do No Harm: Intersex Surgeries and the Limits of Certainty,” Nursing Clio

Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053-1075