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Beans Velocci, "Sex Isn't Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary" (Duke UP, 2026)
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Beans Veloci
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Clayton Gerard
welcome to New Books Network. My name is Clayton Gerard. My pronouns are he, him, and today I am here with Beans Veloci, author of Sex Isn't Real. The Invention of an Incoherent Binary Sex Isn't Real traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define sex and to create a world devoid of trans life. Drawing on lab notes, family genealogies, medical case studies, and more, Beans Veloci follows scientists and clinicians from the mid 19th century through the mid 20th century and across five disciplines zoology, eugenics, gynecology, statistical sexology, and transsexual medicine. As their ideas and practices created a definitional tangle, they demonstrate how the sorting of bodies into male and female persists not despite, but because of sex's incoherence. The defining features of these categories shift to contain various understandings of anatomy and physiology, theories of race, developments and research, and medical methodologies and bodies that cannot be accounted for in a binary framework. Exposing the endless work required to produce a world in which most people have a binary gender identity that neatly fits with their binarily sexed body. Veloci demonstrates that it is not CIS people who fit the categories, it's the categories that flex to make them fit. So thank you so much for being here with Me today, Beans. I've been looking forward to this conversation, especially about all the exciting and interesting and honestly, like, ground shaking claims and observations that you see in the book. And so it's just such an important conversation to be having about this incoherence of sex as you describe it. So before we dive into the actual content of the book, would you mind introducing yourselves to listeners?
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Beans Veloci
Sure. Well, first, thank you for having me on the show. This is my, like, third ever of this type of thing, so it's still very exciting. Yeah. So I'm Bean's Velocity. Pronouns are they, them. And I'm an assistant professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science and the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, which is a lot of words that basically mean I'm a historian who thinks a lot about science classification and sex, gender, sexuality as we now call them in a. In a very kind of interdisciplinary way that's grounded in archival research.
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Clayton Gerard
Awesome. Honestly, that was a great little introduction for everything that you are figuring out for us in the book. So to start off, would you mind just telling us a little bit about how this book came about for you?
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Beans Veloci
Yeah, it came about kind of through a few different pathways. And so one of them, and I would say this is like the biggest motivation that kind of kept the whole project going, goes back to when I was in my sophomore year of undergrad and read Foucault for a couple for the first time and realized that everything that I had always been feeling about, like, being bad at doing gender right was actually the result of a whole systemic thing and that it was all made up and therefore I didn't have to do it. And so that was kind of how I came to my own sense of transness and non binariness through that. And so when I got to grad school years later, I still kind of had that in the back of my head. Like, I wasn't planning on doing trans history. In fact was very emphatically not gonna do trans history because I was just like, that is too. It's too close, it's too real. I don't want to be like that involved in, you know, kind of dissecting my own experience and having to, like, constantly confront that which, you know, that would have been a good idea if I had stuck to it. This did wind up being very hard for many of those reasons. But I eventually kind of got to a point where I was like, it is simply too important to me personally that there's this kind of Sense of, like, academic history is not actually separate from contemporary politics and more importantly, from individual experiences of people reading things and figuring out important things about themselves. And so that was kind of the big underlying thing and the kind of idea that sort of sustained me through all of it when things got really difficult. But I would also say that there were two kind of intellectual trajectories as well, kind of related to how trans history was developing as a field. Around 2018, 2019, when I was first starting the project, one of those components was that it was actually a really exciting time in trans history. Several books kind of came out in quick succession that were either trans history written by historians, or kind of books that had historical components or were kind of using interdisciplinary methodologies to get at some kind of historical understanding. And that was really exciting. I could not have done the work that I'm doing without them. But I found that I found myself kind of being a little dissatisfied, I guess, or with what felt like a way of locating the subject of trans history in the past, which I talk a lot about in the book, but basically boils down to looking for really kind of specific behavioral traits that people who were, like, really transgressing gender would kind of exhibit that then get caught up in the archive. And then historians in the present could be like, aha, a trans person that's recognizable to me. And I was kind of like, like, but what about everyone else? Like, what is it about this specific array of things that we're looking for that signifies transness when you can just as easily, you know, like. Like one example is, like, people who are working gendered jobs, right? Because it's like, we're talking about, like, the 19th century or even the first, you know, many decades of the 20th century. There's a really gender segregated labor market, right? And so one of the things that we might find in the archive is someone who. Let's say we're looking at, like, a 19th century set of documents. We see someone who is, you know, arrested for cross dressing or something. Okay? So sure. One. One trait there is cross dressing. Okay? Lots of people wear clothes for various reasons that are not, you know, the clothing that they're assigned sex or gender would, you know, dictate. And then this, you know, this labor thing, right? So we might find someone who, again, this person who got, you know, maybe they were arrested for cross dressing. It turns out that there is, you know, and they were, like, masquerading as a man, right? Someone who that we might now refer to as a trans man. And Maybe they are. Maybe they're working in a mine or, you know, they're working as a lumberjack. I don't know. One of these very kind of like male coded sort of jobs. And there's been this big debate in the historiography for a very long time of like, are people who are working jobs outside of their, you know, gender category, are they like women who are trying to, you know, make it in a labor market where men are getting paid way more? Right. And that it's this kind of like need based thing, like an economic need, or are they trans people? And we can recognize that because, you know, if they're in this job that is at odds with what they're supposed to be doing, if they're supposed to be like a seamstress or something, I don't know. This is all a really roundabout way to say that. I was reading these kinds of histories and just kept thinking, like, this stuff doesn't only apply to trans people. That doesn't mean that it's not important to do this kind of like reclamation work. And also, why, why are we assuming that anyone who is, like, not getting picked up for cross dressing, like, why are we assuming that those people are cis? That feels very historical to me. So there was, there was that kind of thread, and then there was also, at that point, I was in coursework and doing field exams and just reading a lot in 19th and early 20th century black women's history. And in the course of that encountered the story of Frances Thompson, which has now been taken up by a couple of different historians. But long story short, she's a formerly enslaved, what we would call trans woman who does some really important testimony that leads to reconstruction being enacted and then 10 years later arrested for cross dressing. And there's this whole, like, media bonanza where newspapers across the country are being like, francis Thompson was lying about being a woman. What else is she lying about? Right? And the thing that I was finding there was that the phrase Francis Thompson case, or even just like a gesture to her name was being used to discredit black women who had not been arrested for cross dressing and who wouldn't have fit in a trans kind of category, using a kind of like, you know, contemporary definition of transness. And I kept being like, this is, you know, there's a strain of black feminist thought going back to decades at this point, talking about the degendering of black women. What if that tells us something about not just gender, but about how sex as a category works, right? Like, how can sex be binary when it's simultaneously being used to make claims about racial difference at the site of, like, physical sexual difference. That does not seem like a binary as possible to me. And so. So what if we kind of combine thinking about trans history in. In a sense of, like, of course trans people existed in the past. What if we combine that with a kind of black feminist approach that's. That is taking really seriously the degendering of black women? What does that tell us about sex as a system? And so with all of those things combined, I wound up doing this project.
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Clayton Gerard
Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. And really, like, foregrounding the constructedness of, you know, sex as a concept and these, like, various issues that you carefully unspool throughout the book and kind of show how these constructions have then been naturalized, you know, as we now look back at them through the historiography and different things. So to start off a little bit, to ground this conversation, I guess I want to talk a bit about how you're approaching this concept of sex. And from the very beginning of the book, you make it clear that the concept of quote, unquote, biological sex is more a product of culture than a product of science. And this definitely comes from your training and expertise in history of science and technology. Would you be able to frame for this discussion what biological sex as a concept does culturally, often with the auspices of, like, the scientific basis, that gives us some sort of legitimacy?
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Beans Veloci
It functions, I would say, as a kind of appeal to nature. And by that I mean a lot of the time in the present when we see, you know, someone using the phrase biological sex, which actually in and of itself is. Is a relatively recent, you know, like, that phrase is relatively new. That is not something that my historical actors in the book are talking about at all. So in the present and through the history of that term. But I would say sex in general is this kind of projection of what we might now call gender norms onto the natural world as a way to make a claim about how things should be right. Because science, you know, for all that we could talk about, you know, living in a kind of, like, post truth or anti science or whatever kind of world, science as a kind of abstract concept still carries a lot of weight. And biology, of course, is tied to science specifically. And so what biological sex kind of does, it almost kind of sidesteps the possibility even of social construction by treating sex as something that is inherent, that has this kind of, like, objective reality to it. We can even see this in, like, the executive order that came out Last January, trying to define sex. Right. It's this kind of effort to. Even if, even if, I guess I say effort, it might not even be intentional. But what ends up happening is that you can then kind of circumvent all of this other baggage that accrues to sex that like, the book talks about by sort of just saying, well, this is biology. How can you argue with biology?
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Clayton Gerard
Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. It's so important to kind of recognize, like, the history in which these terms emerge that we, like you, even gestured to that in the beginning, talking about, you know, just how this book came about. And without investigating and interrogating these concepts, it really does kind of scaffold this present understanding and allows us to like, you know, project that onto the past. So I'm going to quote you. This is a bit of a long quote. In the introduction, you say, quote, sex amassed its power to sort bodies not from fixed, agreed upon parameters, but from a tacit agreement that it could be multiple, often contradictory things at once. Sex has worked as a way of socially ordering the world with the cultural weight of science behind it, because researchers could and did reclassify bodies, redefine categorical criteria, and reconstitute what they considered sex. End quote. Can you talk about how you're approaching sex as an object of scientific study and questioning how scientists used sex in the service of their own ends? And I think that's one of the things that stood out to me most in this book is how you're really highlighting the ways in which scientists kind of deployed these understandings to really reify and affirm their power and authority in a lot of different scenarios.
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Beans Veloci
Well, I'll start by saying that I, I've always had authority problems. And so I've, I've just like always tended to be right. If, if we wanted to talk about like a, a born this way narrative, like something that I can say about myself is that I have just like always been like, well, that doesn't make sense. Why is that how things are? And so that, on a really basic level is kind of how I was approaching this, to just be like, wait a second, how does this work? None of this adds up, right? This is supposed to be this natural truth or whatever, this being sex. But if you actually start poking at it, you see, you know, okay, one person's defining it by chromosomes, one person's defining it by gamete size. One person is like defining it here by like, internal organs. But then in practice, they're, they're using like, not Even like external genitals, but just like what people might call like secondary sex characteristics, like you know, amount of body hair or whatever. And so that was a signal to me to like really start digging, to kind of keep poking at it. And yeah, what I found was kind of, as you said, a kind of strong correlation, I guess. Right. I don't want, I don't want to paint the picture of kind of like a bunch of like mustache swirling, twirling scientists being like, ah, haha, we will define sex in these contradictory ways. Sometimes there was that, that kind of vibe, especially when you get into the eugenic stuff, but sometimes it is almost more, you know, it's not so much that scientists are very intentionally going about this, but they do have a lot of cultural authority and sex has been, you know, even before some of, you know, with talking about 20th century scientists, they're reinforcing something that's already existing. And so some of the earlier stuff that I talk about is more about the kind of like construction of sex as this thing that can be multiple things at once. But it's this, it's a kind of feedback loop really, so that by the time we get to the present, it's not even, it's not even clear that this is happening when you first look at it. Right. Because to go back to what I was saying about biological sex, there's already so much of this sense that sex is this unquestionable biological, natural truth. Right. That that's what gets taught in biology classrooms and medical schools. Right. Even, even if it's kind of now we're starting to see some scientists do more of a sense of thinking about sex as a kind of like collection of traits. And it's kind of like, okay, what are we going to emphasize now? Or we need to be really specific about what we're talking about when we say sex. But even that. Right. Is still kind of operating in this. There is a thing called sex and that is a biological thing and therefore something that we don't need to poke at that much. So I don't know if that quite answers your question. I think you were getting at the kind of issue of authority a bit more.
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Clayton Gerard
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great way of answering the question. And I think another follow up may be how this consolidation of these various different aspects or features or even quote unquote, symptoms of what might be this sex, you know, as a thing, like what purpose does it then serve for these scientists as they start like sorting and trying to govern the Social order and such too.
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Beans Veloci
Yeah. So it serves a bunch of different purposes. And I mean, I think one of the big ones that is, I would say most obvious in like chapters one and two of the book, but really kind of suffuses the whole thing is, you know, as I was alluding to before, the kind of construction of race using kind of deviant, quote unquote, sexual characteristics to make that distinction. So there's like a really, really classic example that comes up in a lot of historical scholarship in this area where there's this, you know, late 19th, early 20th cent, British sexologist named Havelock Ellis. And he has this diagram in this book that he writes called male and female, but where he is visually pointing out the differences between white European women and Andamanese women. And it's two pelvises just like outlined. And the European woman's pelvis is like, much wider. He refers to it as like, fuller and like globular than the Antonis woman, which is much narrower. And he goes on to say in the book, and other kind of scholars building on his work and in conversation with it kind of go on to say, like, well, the Andamanese woman is less feminine. Right. We can see in this European woman that kind of evolutionary progress that has led her to be like more bipedal and to have a greater degree of sexual dimorphism, so greater difference than, you know, European men. Whereas the Antobenese woman is, you know, quote, unquote primitive, hasn't evolved. This, this degree of sexual dimorphism is a little bit like more kind of like hunched over even. And so one of the things that sex is doing in kind of that realm of work kind of at this moment of on one hand we have like the. The end of like legal slavery in the US and we also have both the US and numerous places in Europe kind of engaging in sort of like a new wave of colonialism. And one of the things that's going on there is using these kind of evolutionary arguments about primitivity to say, well, it's good for white people to go in and colonize these places because, you know, the people living there, you know, can't take care of themselves or, you know, aren't using the land properly or things like that. And so sex and the study of sex becomes really deeply entwined with these racializing processes, I guess. So there's that element of it. We also see it a lot in eugenic science, which is, um, I'll. I'll just like stick a little pin in is is like the origin of like American genetic science and, and European genetic science. But in, in the US it's just like particularly this is what chapter two is about entangled, right? And, and kind of using these evolutionary discourses and saying there's more sexual dimorphism at like the kind of white pinnacle of evolution and less as you go kind of down this like evolutionary ladder. And so that is, that's like one kind of use of, of sex. A related one is also the kind of professionalization of sex science. And so there's, there's a lot that I could, I could like really get into the weeds here. But a really short version would be the mid to late 19th century is where we're kind of seeing the consolidation of people working on reproduction. There's a kind of new types of zoology. New institutions are being formed, as in literal land grant universities are coming into being. Some privately funded research institutions like the Eugenics Record Office and the Station for Experimental Evolution are starting up their new academic kind of societies. And so you have scientists who are now kind of vying for who is going to get to define sex, who are going to be the scientists who are most trusted as experts to explain the world. And so that's also where you kind of get sex functioning as a site where like that kind of power can be almost experimented with. And in that we also get, you know, science is kind of self consciously being like those of us who are doing sexology, for example, are actually doing better science than everyone else because we need to be good at anatomy and physiology and genetics and psychology and all of these kind of things. So you can really see actually it's quite impressive just how clear it is that we're at this moment, especially in the early 20th century where sex is this site of just like a much broader scientific contestation of like who is a reliable knower.
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- [29:07]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah, thank you so much for speaking to that. And it's it really, I mean, thinking about the conversation, I mean, even just thus far is barely scratching the surface of all that you're doing in the introduction specifically. And it's even hard to talk about because there's so much multiplicity and incoherence as you outline those, like, fundamental forces of sex, which is which makes it hard to just talk about for people to be listening in on, because there's so much to just like, well, this or qualify or this quote, unquote, you know, so maybe just thinking through what we've talked about so far, like, sex becomes this object of scientific study performing so many different functions, whether it's like looking at reproduction or, quote, unquote, secondary sex characteristics or even just like, the anatomy and, like, questions of, like, race and sexual dimorphism. But then there's also the more sociopolitical or economic things of, like, gendered labor markets or, like, you know, who's working in what way and or wearing what clothes, as if there's clothes assigned at birth or something. And so, like, sex is performing all these different functions, and yet science and these different kinds of authority are trying to come in and provide some stability to really affirm the, like, social, political and economic project that they're really like, embedding with white supremacy and racial capitalism, so on and so forth. And so, like, thinking of this huge array of, like, research that you're looking at as a historian and the ways in which they're trying to consolidate sex into something that becomes, like, politically useful, scientifically advantageous, and even just a shorthand for these different social norms, can you talk a little bit about the method that you're putting forth? Because you're calling it as, like, trans history as a method. And this really Underscores how you talked about beginning the project of, like, we take for granted a lot of these categories as just being natural, which is making, you know, even the discussion of sex very difficult. But you say, quote, this is the promise of trans history to trouble the line between, quote, natural cisness and quote, unnatural transness, and thereby make it abundantly clear that, quote, non trans people, sex and gender are just as constructed as trans people, end quote. Can you describe what you're talking about here as trans history and explain a little bit more about the process of troubling these distinctions that are often taken for granted and what that does to your project as a whole and, like, what it can unlock for other people who are seeking to, you know, further these questions and engage in trans history or other interdisciplinary methods.
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Beans Veloci
So the way that I'm approaching trans history is really indebted to Susan Stryker and Sandy Stone, who are two of the, you know, sort of founders of trans studies. But both of them in. In various pieces are kind of making this point about trans people are constantly seen as unnatural, right? Because of the use of medical transition, especially. And CIS people are supposed to just kind of exist out in the world without really needing any, you know, kind of determination of them being cis.
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Clayton Gerard
Right?
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Beans Veloci
Cis normativity, basically. And so what I wanted to do when I. Because what I was saying before about the kind of spate of trans history texts that kind of came out in the late 2010s and early 2020s, as I was doing this project, I was kind of really informed by Stryker and Stone's work and thinking, what if we kind of take that, like, what's really, in some ways kind of a political claim and apply that to the study of history, right? What if we're not looking for the trans people, but are kind of using almost like a sort of negative space sort of approach to think about, okay, how. How is it that there are so many CIS people, you know, as. As we might categorize them now, that are violating gender norms all the time, right? We. There's. It's everywhere. It's like how multiple other forms of social hierarchy operate, right? Whether that's something like race, you know, the kind of policing of gender categories, even something kind of like class, where the markers are usually really gendered ability, right? All of these other things are kind of functioning on. Are you doing gender, sex, slash sexuality, right? Or are you not? And so what I'm calling a trans method is kind of starting from the assumption that, like, CIS people are also constructed, which is like it's actually kind of simple. Like, the more that I talk about, like, oh, is. Is like being like, ah, I developed this method and honestly, like, a lot of the time it's really just taking historical actors at their word when they say things. It's like, oh, this person is like, not actually a woman. Okay, what does that mean then? Instead of being like, well, certainly this is just kind of an exaggeration or a metaphor or whatever. What actually is going on here rather than kind of thinking about as a lot of like, history of sex science does like sex as this kind of category that, like, sure, a lot of cultural baggage and social baggage has kind of accrued to, but fundamentally there's still kind of a there there. And so, yeah, the way that I am approaching all of this stuff is kind of through a trans lens. That's in part, you know, just like, it's trans history because I'm doing it right. Like, it's also some of. Some of what's going on there. But I increasingly am like, in some ways I like, it's important to me that this is trans history at the same time that I'm like, if anyone's trying to do gender history at this point, and they're just like, oh, yeah, sex is a binary biological category. I'm kind of like, what are you doing? Like, how are. Like, there's been a lot of, like, you know, even if you're like, living in a total bubble, there's been a lot of scholarship about, you know, from multiple disciplines about how sex is not this, like, static, binary, natural thing. And so it's trans history. Right. And that's. I'm kind of staking a claim there that there is something distinct that transness offers. Right. Because trans history is often seen as such a kind of niche topic. And so part of what I'm doing is also making the case that you can't just ignore the way that this actually provides a more robust and rigorous way of doing historical scholarship about this stuff. But then also, like, it would be really cool if I didn't have to call it trans history because, like, at this point, I don't. I don't know if I could even do work without this kind of framework. Even if I'm not working specifically on, like, the history of sex. I mean, I'm doing. I'm like, just starting a new project that it's not. Not about the history of sex science, but it's, you know, very much also about, like, cold war planning and anxiety about reproduction, post, like, nuclear accident. Or disaster or war. Right. And so it's not something that you'd be like, ah, trans history. Yeah, but like, the question that I'm fundamentally asking is, like, how does. How is all of this stuff constructing sex? How is it kind of biologizing something as binary that has, like, literally just been shown, you know, in the 1950s and 60s to actually be quite malleable. So, yeah, that's kind of a scramble of things.
- [38:07]
Clayton Gerard
But, yeah, I mean, but it's so true at the same time that, like, especially the fact that you mentioned it's a very simple thing, especially as a historical analysis, to just be like, oh, sex. Well, how do we come up with this category? And like, what is it doing here? But like, you know, just also looking back and recognize that cisness itself is constructed like these categories. It's not just, you know, that quote unquote, abnormal that's been constructed, but the normal was constructed as part of that process and delineation of the abnormal. So it does seem almost like intuitive to just question that. But at the same time, we have been primed so, like, comprehensively to not question some of these categories that, you know, it does take like, kind of this landmark effort to be like, oh, no, actually, maybe we should think about this.
- [39:03]
Beans Veloci
Yeah, it was. It was really. That's like one of the. I mean, I think this happens to anyone who is, you know, writing a book, really, of any kind, where you just like, eventually get so deep in it that you're like, surely this is obvious. Right? Like, do I even need to be. Am I even saying anything like, notable? Do I even need to be doing this? And then having to, like, step back for a second and look around and be like, oh, no, I do actually need to do this. It's a really weird feeling, I think, especially with something like this, where to me, it. It is so. So second nature at this point. Right. Because I kind of started maybe not questioning the category of sex, but I started categorying, categorying, questioning the category of, like, binary gender. Right. Like, pretty, Pretty early on in my life. And so it was really easy to then be like, oh, right, yeah, this applies to sex too. But. But it is. It's. Yeah, it's really weird because it does. Sometimes it seems so simple. Like, I think sometimes when people ask about, like, the trans method kind of thing, they expect that it's going to be like this whole big, like, okay, we're gonna like, correlate this thing with this thing, and then I'm gonna like, run it through this scanner and whatever. And it's like, literally, it's sometimes just like, well, they say on this page here that sex is not a biological category. So there you have it.
- [40:42]
Clayton Gerard
I wonder what they meant.
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Beans Veloci
Right.
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Clayton Gerard
Yes. I love that. And it's like, you know, with some of these things, especially thinking, like, archival research and stuff, there's, you know, the whole reading against the grain. And part of it's like. I mean, some of this stuff is just out in the open. There's no against the grain to read.
- [41:02]
Beans Veloci
Exactly, exactly. I think about that all the time, actually, because, like, there is. I mean, just. Just in thinking about kind of archival method, which I'm just always really interested in, I absolutely had to do the kind of work where, you know, what I'm looking for is not in a finding aid. It's not typically keyword searchable. I mean, like, I eventually, you know, came up with some, like, shortcuts to things. But. But, I mean, a lot of it was just reading through tons and tons and tons of stuff and, like, kind of distilling that down. Because often, you know, it was often like, okay, here's a couple of lines in this piece. Here's all of these, like, medical case studies. And of course, they're not saying that, you know, none of these patients are women, but, like, that's really at odds with what they're actually saying. So I guess there's a little reading against the grain. But, yeah, sometimes I'm just like, no, it's right there. It's just that, like, it takes some time to, like, locate. You have to just like, read through a bunch of stuff that is not relevant because it's just, you know, the. The way that archival collections are categorized, you know, is not. Doesn't quite map on to, like, this particular, you know, kind of set of research questions.
- [42:33]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah. So thinking about that, so far, we've kind of been discussing the inadequacy, basically, of, like, the sex binary because, like, it's, you know, constructed in these ways and multiple and incoherent and, like, you know, all these different questions to be thinking about when we approach the topic of sex as a concept. But now kind of going through some of the chapters you provide. Like, as we've discussed, there's such a wide array of ways of looking at sex, and you kind of, like, bring them together to be in conversation with each other. So I'd love to have a bit more of a granular conversation of how these things are moving and how sex appears in these different areas of research. So your first Chapter looks at how sex became a multiplicity through 19th century zoological and animal research. And you note that one of the primary motivations for scientists studying sex was in service of constructing racial contrast, which we've touched on briefly. Can you describe some of the conflicting ways sex appeared in these studies and how these understandings were influenced by. By theories of race and evolution, specifically looking at like non human or more than human, you know, animals or forms of life?
- [43:51]
Beans Veloci
Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of it really goes back to that kind of evolutionary narrative, I guess. And so there's a lot of different research that is going on in this period. And one of the things that I try to do in this chapter, right. Is. Is a lot of kind of history of sex science, or history of sexology proper, I guess, tends to start like 1870s and later, for lots of reasons that I won't go into. You can read about them in the book. One of the things that I wanted to do was kind of go back further than that and kind of be like, okay, where did that come from? Um, and so that was really motivated by. By this question of kind of like, okay, so we have like the end of formal slavery in the U.S. what does that do? Right. Like, surely that has some kind of bearing on how people are studying sex. And so one of, one of the things that happens is you get this really kind of confluence of these racial motivations with like, the real kind of uptake of, you know, kind of at this point, various forms of evolutionary theory, which in practice winds up looking like a lot of, you know, okay, how do we. How do we define sex, first of all, but then also, like, how can we arrange life according to how much maleness and femaleness there is and how much difference there are between those categories? And so you have a lot of interest in what are at the time referred to as hermaphroditic species. And so that's stuff like, oysters are a big one. Which actually I didn't end up writing about oysters in the book, but there's a really kind of. I find intriguing. And it just kind of. It wound up just like, not really fitting. And so I didn't really go with it. But around when oysters are getting like, really popular as like a more like widespread food product, in part because of things like, you know, like the Erie Canal, you get a lot of scientists who are suddenly really interested in oysters partly for they're, you know, just like the. Okay, how are we gonna like, breed more oysters for people to eat on? Like, Practical level. But then also this kind of like, how are we gonna, like, what does this mean for how we're thinking about life? That these oysters seem to like, not have any sex distinction and like reproduce in this way that we don't quite understand. And so those kind of like, there's a kind of real interest in hermaphroditism or kind of like hermaphroditism as it kind of departs from, or not departs from rather actually it's kind of the opposite. Hermaphroditism as this kind of like originary state from which life then, you know, proceeds kind of upward and like outward, I guess in the sense of as life gets more evolved, it gets more sexually dimorphic. And so a lot of the scientific research at this moment, including in, in agricultural research, is about this kind of like what, what do these instances of hermaphroditism tell us about like how sex is kind of determined and then, and how it does sex develop? And so it's a kind of learning opportunity, I guess, for trying to better understand how evolution works. It's useful in that we're starting to get the beginnings of industrial and more science based agriculture. And then of course the racial dimensions in which this kind of hermaphroditism to like full sex binary kind of spectrum conveniently really works for defining, defining race. And so one of the other things that I think is really interesting about this also is just like how it speaks to sex is just like in the history of science actually like crucially important, right? Like we often. It's actually kind of weird. I find that like there are a lot of things, a lot of like research areas that are fundamentally dependent on reproduction and like theories of reproduction that like aren't considered by historians or the people even doing them sometimes to be like, about sex. But it's like the entirety of like any kind of like evolutionary science. Anything having anything to do with like heredity. The entire study of genetics, right, all of that is based on this idea of sexual reproduction. And so it's fundamentally always making claims about sex. And so that I found also really interesting was that it was kind of this lens in the first chapter especially into why, why study sex in the first place. Like kind of in a similar way of, of basically being like trans history is not this niche subject. But also to be like sex research is actually a much bigger thing than we often talk about and is kind of the groundwork for multiple areas of science. And like we kind of need to, to look More into that.
- [49:53]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah, for sure. And I think also looking at how, you know, you're doing this trans history methodologically is so interesting to think of these topics because, you know, often we're talking about the inadequacy of like, you know, quote unquote, biological sex and the binary kind of thing. It's like, well, this animal has like a, you know, third gender, this animal like reproduces differently, or this species, you know, doesn't follow along the male female binary. And instead of being like, oh well, we need a better way to like add a third category or, you know, you're actually questioning, well, does that might lead us to ask if this even works in the first place. And so I really appreciate how you're taking that lens to look at this like vast array of like research done around like animals, non human species and so on. And thinking of your second chapter, it kind of goes along with some of the same inquiries looking at eugenics and thinking of sex in the context of reproduction and genetics and so on. You observe, quote, eugenicists in the early 20th century depended on an incoherent conception of sex in order to make their claims to a scientifically backed racial superiority work. And we've talked a bit about, you know, this use of sex and science for racial work and racial ordering and such. But can you talk about how sex became utilized for these initiatives of racial improvement?
- [51:28]
Beans Veloci
Absolutely. So this was where I really started to see the kind of like divergence of what sex even means in these really very like clear cut ways. Because like in the first chapter, like I, you know, have these kind of various examples of like, okay, in, in the case of like bees are talking about sex this way, or like here we can see that like they're using these kind of different definitions. But when you get to eugenics, you get like the kind of a much more systematic, I guess, approach to sex. And I mean, that's kind of one of the arguments of the chapter as well is that like there is this kind of shift in kind of how science is being done because of that kind of like professionalization and expertise building stuff that I was talking about. But so what I found with the eugenics stuff, so there is a still functioning laboratory. It's now called Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Fun. Sidebar. I actually went to DNA summer camp there as a kid and they don't tell you about the eugenics stuff. So, so when I was like starting to just, you know, kind of following this sort of like breadcrumb trail through the archives, I kept Coming across like, oh, like they're all going to Cold Spring Harbor. What, like, what is this? And so it turns out there were these two kind of what I call laboratories in Cold Spring harbor run by this guy named Charles Davenport, who had been trained as a zoologist and then gets really into human heredity and eugenics. So it's the Eugenics Record Office and the Station for Experimental Evolution. And they're kind of doing two different things, but they're part of the same sort of institutional blob and this kind of Davenport sort of like twin mission here. And so the ERO does a bunch of heredity studies primarily by doing family history research. And so what they would do is they would either, you know, kind of hand out a bunch of these forms for people who were enthusiastic about kind of sharing their family history for eugenic purposes. Which was a lot of people to kind of just be like, okay, well let's go through your whole family tree and figure out like, what are the traits that we might be able to track as potentially inheritable. They also would send like field workers, usually like women social workers and biologists out to various prisons and asylums and stuff like that to also record prisoner and patient family histories. And so what their job was basically was to collect really large amounts of data that were the product of a kind of like breeding pair, right? So doing this kind of very reproduction focused family study. Family has a lot of gendered baggage attached to it. And then they're kind of processing this massive amount of data and kind of have to come up with systems for doing that. And so the upshot of all of this is they wind up using a really straightforward male, female binary. Um, there's no other option. And we're going to do all of our analysis using those categories. Meanwhile, the Station for Experimental Evolution is really interested in basically how you can control evolution in the lab for, you know, dreams of racial uplift. By which what's actually really like, I mean, funny is not the right word, but like they always talk about the race, but like they weirdly, like they don't actually ever define what they mean by that. Like, I think we often think about eugenics as a project that's kind of like very self consciously like about race and like it is. But they're much more explicitly engaging with like, ability, class, like all of these things that are, they're kind of like, well, this is about white people, so we actually don't need to talk about race at all. Which I find really interesting. And now I've Forgotten where I was going. Ah, yeah. Trying to kind of like demonstrate that they figure out how to control evolution in a lab setting with the hope of eventually being able to apply it to humans. And so of course they're doing a lot of like, breeding research. But they're also. One of the things that they're doing is trying to figure out how to like, control sex in the lab. And so they've got this one guy. I mean, they have a couple of people who are doing this type of research. But one of them that I focus on is Oscar Riddle, who is interested in what he calls sex reversal. And he's mostly working with birds, right? But they're literally like, okay, knowing what we increasingly understand about, like, sex characteristics, as they're calling them, hormones, all of that kind of thing, right. There are still also many theories of sex at this point. So like, Riddle is actually thinking about sex as a like, sex distinction, as a product of like, metabolism. So that there's like a different male and female type of, you know, amount of metabolism and that you can, by like changing the kind of like, amount of food that that something is eating or like the temperature or whatever, you can kind of like modify sex characteristics. But so there he is in the lab, like, and, and like, literally, like changing, changing the sex characteristics of various animals and being like, ah, yes, this is all like inherently like hermaphroditic or like using a word like bisexuality, which has a different meaning than it means now. But basically just like all organisms can have male and female traits or contain the possibility to develop those traits, and they can be kind of like moved around. And then these also, and Davenport too are making are like, using this research as an example of the kind of like, power of eugenic science. Like, oh, everyone thought that sex wasn't changeable, but here we have shown that you can actually change this, like, fundamental fact of life. And so what else can we do? Right? Everything else will be easier from here, both because we can have more control over reproduction, but also because it's not actually that hard to do. If we can change sex, then we have the power to do anything, basically.
- [58:56]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah. Thank you so much for speaking to that. And like, I really find it interesting and want to continue this on with the next question of like, thinking about sex as like, data and the construction of data, the collection of data and how that then informs, like, what sex is then meant to mean. In chapter three, you look at mid 20th century gynecological research and one person, interestingly, Robert Lato Latu who interestingly postulated that sex manifested in degrees rather than in a binary kind. And then you have like chapter four, which looks at Alfred Kinsey's like large scale quantitative research which showed the variance of a of American sexual behaviors, but also the methods that they used allowed them to just treat anomalous cases as insignificant in their data sets, which then, you know, had the function of disappearing the reality of sex outside of this binary. And so can you speak to how these different methodological and practical approaches to sex, you know, in gynecology and this like quantitative statistical research, but then also in these other areas that we've been talking about, contested and reified the construction of the sex binary as we now take it for granted.
- [60:14]
Beans Veloci
This wounded being one. Like I was not when I started this project thinking that I would get as into the data and quantification stuff as I ultimately did. But it wound up being really interesting to me and I wound up teaching myself the history of statistics to write chapter four.
- [60:31]
Clayton Gerard
It's very juicy.
- [60:32]
Beans Veloci
Thank you. It was a struggle to try to make statistics interesting. I hope I succeeded because I was like, ah, this is so cool and weird, but you know, it's maybe a little bit of a hard sell. But yeah, I mean in both of these chapters, I mean, and other ones as well. But I think this one and chapter two deal the most with the kind of like information infrastructure type stuff. I became really interested in. Like, how is the actual, like, how is the method that research is happening? How are the like forms of analysis that are being perceived as like the right way to know things? Like how is that shaping the knowledge that can and can't be made? And so there's kind of a through line in some ways with chapters two, three and four, where you increasingly shift from this kind of like the scientific or medical interest in sex is usually taking the form of a kind of like individual case study of like, ooh, look at this like weird thing that I find. What does that tell us? And sometimes it's not that that was this very justice, queer, life oriented kind of thing. Right. They're using it for colonialism. So not to be like, ooh, there's a trans affirming space, there's not. But that kind of research produces a different type of knowledge than something like Kinsey is doing. The individual doesn't remotely matter. All that we care about is what is most common and we find that by doing some fancy counting. And so Robert Lucy Dickinson is kind of an interesting bridge between those spaces for me and kind of became the crux of the book, because you can see not just like, oh, these two labs run by the same guy are defining sex differently. But you could see that tension of, is sex a static, binary thing? Or is it something that's kind of a conglomeration of mushy things that's kind of malleable in one person's research and not even in a shift over time way so much as a, like, simultaneous. He is managing to kind of hold both of these things in his head at the same time. And so you get with Dickinson a kind of early attempt to, you know, he has all of these patient records, basically, and he's like, okay, I'm going to analyze these with the help of a researcher named Laura Bean, who is actually credited for the research as an author, which is very rare. Although not credited, she basically wrote the books. But we can kind of see in them. Dickinson is like, I have these thousand plus case studies. Let's analyze all of them, but. And see what kind of trends we can find, because we don't actually know what normal is. And of course, along the way, there's like, all of these people who would fit the definition of like or the model of sex that he is elsewhere using, which is this. This kind of similar to Oscar Riddle, kind of like, sex is a matter of degree. So basically, like, how male or how female you are. But then there's also most people, he's saying, are kind of in the middle on a kind of, like, spectrum of, like, intersex traits. And that, like, he literally says at one point, like, full sex differentiation is rare, minor sex defect is frequent. And so he's kind of doing these things at the same time, which I find really interesting. And the thing that I argue in the chapter kind of tips him more into the, like, in practice, sex becomes this kind of binary, like, research variable, basically, is that he's, you know, he's a committed eugenicist. And ultimately he does kind of, like, side with the kind of, like, white women are, like, the most evolved and therefore the most sexually dimorphic. And so all the other stuff kind of falls away with that. And then in chapter four is where we, like, really get into the statistics stuff. But, yeah, I mean, I became really interested in kind of, like, there was a lot of stuff that had to be, like, unknown. Like, there was a lot of knowledge that had been created about sex in the late 19th and early 20th century that was really focused on sex as this kind of, like, malleable thing as made up of multiple components. And There was a lot of research to that effect. Like, that was like, you know, not this kind of like fringe theory. That was like how a lot of the top biologists in the US and Europe were thinking about sex at that time. And then by the time we get to the mid 20th century, that has kind of disappeared, slash, been kind of like cordoned off into transsexuality is the term that they were using at the time. And so with the Kinsey chapter, one of the factors in that, I mean, there are of course a lot of things going on, but one of the big factors in that is that the Kinsey studies and their authors are kind of trying to differentiate themselves from people like Dickinson, even though they're kind of inspired by Dickinson and the Eugenics Record Office and stuff like that. But they're like, okay, we're going to use these new cutting edge statistical methods. Statistics also, by the way, is invented for eugenic purposes. So there's that too. But basically we're going to, you know, kind of have these new rules about, like, data collection and like, how you make a claim that something is significant, you know, like that kind of stuff, which then does have this effect of kind of closing down those earlier spaces where there was much more conversation about what sexual itself was and these kind of a much broader sense of possibility, and again, not in favor for the most part of queer and trans life, but nonetheless a kind of basis of knowledge that was not so firmly clamped down on a kind of binary framing. And I think the Kinsey studies have a lot to do with that. Right. Also kind of turning the attention of people studying sex from the body per se to behavior.
- [68:02]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. And like, it directly tees us up for your fifth chapter, which looks at trans medicine and the construction of the transsexual as a category that does not contest the sex binary, which is a very interesting, you know, sleight of hand to introduce. So specifically you note that the consequences of the incoherency of sex during this time become a source of suffering for trans patients seeking care, rather than a problem for doctors to have to manage. And this is specifically thinking about how you look at, you know, the power and authority of doctors in this conversation around sex and transsexuality as a category. Can you talk about what led to these developments? And, you know, this kind of really does a lot to position your research in the conversations that are happening today around trans medicine and trans care and such.
- [68:59]
Beans Veloci
It's kind of a confluence of, like, all, all of the other things that happen in these chapters. Right. And, and I would say the construction of transsexuality as a category kind of does have a fair amount to do with kind of creating this like overflow zone to preserve binary sex. But what's weird about that, right? And it's not like, when I put it that way, it's like, ah, that's a very like clear cut kind of thing. Of course it's not actually that clear, right. Because Harry Benjamin, who is the focus of the chapter really, and it was kind of one of the first people doing trans medicine in the US Very much subscribes to this kind of older idea that sex is malleable. Right. That, that unlike some of his peers, he's not saying transsexuality is something that can be like changed with therapy. He's like, no, what we actually need to do is change the body to account for how a person feels. And so part of the story here also, which I don't get into as much in the book, there are a lot of things where it's like, oh, I could, I already have so many layers of footnotes about. You can't possibly fit everything else. But I talk about it a little bit in the conclusion. But one of the things that's kind of also going on through mid century scientific and clinical work on both transsexuality and intersex, which are now kind of being split from each other, is the splitting of sex and gender. And that takes multiple forms kind of over in the second half of the 20th century. And there are kind of several ways that that kind of becomes a popular way of thinking about sex. And that's, you know, partially through this kind of like medical angle, partially through a kind of like feminist uptake of gender as referring to like a system of power. Right. But one of the things that winds up happening is that to kind of go all the way back to what I was saying at the beginning, sex becomes this like biological embodied thing and gender becomes, you know, that kind of mushier, psychological, social stuff, all of that. And so it really ends up. Sorry, I think I just like hit the microphone, not confirming, but like creating, sealing off, I guess sex as something that science has authority over. Right. And this is something that I see even in, you know, the way that gender, sexuality, queer studies, trans studies have kind of gotten like locked into, oh, this is the humanities and social science side of things. You can critique science doing things with sex, but like you can't really actually say anything about sex versus, you Know, biologists and geneticists and all of these other scientists are the ones who get to make claims about sex, because that's the biological thing. And that's certainly not what anyone, to my knowledge, is like, really sitting there thinking about in the mid 20th century. But that is one of the products of this period. For Benjamin and his colleagues, though, I mean, the thing that I kind of went into the research for the fifth chapter, kind of with the question of, okay, we know that certain people are being deemed eligible for medical transition and certain people are not. So what are the characteristics of the people who aren't? What makes them not enough of a woman or a man to medically transition? Because that had kind of been the historical narrative where you had to kind of prove that you were doing gender in a normative way. And what I found was there are absolutely elements of that. And also a lot of it was just like, really practical. Kind of like they were worried about being sued if trans patients, like, regretted their transition. They were running into kind of various imagined legal quandaries and all of that kind of stuff. And that wound up shaping a lot of what trans medicine was. And that, like, it wasn't what I was expecting to find, but what it kind of showed me is that by the end of the span of time that I'm thinking about this question of, like, what is sex? What categories do people fit into? It's kind of like it's not even a question anymore right there. Transsexuality is like, would be such. It would make so much sense if that were a site where people were like, ah, we really need to question what's. What sex is. But it's not at all. At least not in, you know, I think it kind of becomes that later. But in the, you know, the correspondence that I'm reading From, like the 50s, there's, you know, it's. It's more like, is this person gonna pass if they medically transition? If not, we might not wanna let them because they would be more likely to regret their transition. And so it very much lays that moment, kind of lays the groundwork for what we're dealing with now. This kind of trans regret narrative thing is not new. It's actually constitutive of the category of transsexuality in and of itself that, like, the trans person is not someone who can be trusted to make their own medical decisions. But then there's also, yeah, this. This dynamic of, like, that it just didn't really. It was no longer a question of interest as to what transness said about sex, this kind of model of transness as anomaly had kind of set in. And so that kind of ties back to the problem that comes up in the Kinsey stuff of things being named exceptional, rather than a comment on an entire system. And goes back to the kind of methodological problem of the book of, like, we still operate in a world in which trans people are the exception because there's a certain kind of, like, gender deviance that's so extreme that you leave the category you were assigned at birth, but then everyone else who stays in that category is, like, not exceptional. There's. There's nothing like all of those. Like, even as people that we would now think of as cis are doing all of these things that don't align with gender norms at all, they're not getting kicked out of those categories. Right. It's just kind of like, yeah, well, that person's a little weird, but, like, you know, that's. That's fine. They're, you know, a tomboy or whatever. And it's like, how can this category, these categories of male and female and what sex is, be so flexible? How can things just be kind of written off as not important? How is it that even, you know, historians doing trans history and historians of. Of science doing, like, history of sex science stuff, how is that not becoming apparent? And so that, that's. This kind of is ultimately a question of, like, what knowledge doesn't become knowledge. What kind of stuff is, like, seen but not actually interpreted as meaningful. And so that's, you know, ultimately, I think, kind of where the arc of the book ends up.
- [77:46]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. And I'm like, you know, thinking of the arc of the book. I really wanted to kind of circle back to where the book begins. And it's a really important because, like, of the political moment in which the research is done, which the book is coming out. And you mentioned in the acknowledgments that the book was largely written out of spite, which made me smile. And then also, like, thinking about, you know, in the past, your work has been kind of misconstrued in ways by terfs or people trying to do this, like gender critical whatever, you know, wokeness kind of trolling, whatever. But even thinking of the title of your book, Sex Isn't Real, like, there's not really a way to misstate your position when you're, like, talking about this book. So could you talk about a little bit about how you positioned your work in the book to intervene and the politics in the current moment, you know, and the ways in which we're having this conversation.
- [78:50]
Beans Veloci
Yes. So in some ways, I think it is. It's asking a lot of an academic book or maybe portraying myself as, like, having more power than I actually do. But I did write this book because, as, I mean, the world has shifted so much about transness between when I started it in, like, 2017, 2018, and now. And so I started the book kind of writing against a kind of, like, historical portrayal and was like, I hope this does some, like, good work to, you know, or kind of does some useful work to show that, like, this mode of thinking about the past is actually doing, you know, some. Some unintentional damage if it's kind of being held as, like, the one and only way to think about the past. And then as I got more and more into the book, it got more and more ambitious as just, like, everything around me was, like, getting more and more transphobic. And so then it became a book that was like, yeah, spike fueled. It was kind of. I am me writing this is like, the opposite of all of the claims that are being made about trans people. And I am right, and they're wrong. And I don't know if. If, like, one book will have that much of an impact, but, like, if it has some impact, that will be. That will be helpful. And I have, like, you know, already done some work, like, with scientists and with clinicians who are, like, convinced, right. Who have kind of already been, like, there's something weird going on with how we're talking about sexual, but I don't have the right tools to see that with. And so I've been able to be, like, here, consider it this way. And I think that is meaningful. I think also, I mean, going back to Susan Stryker, one of her pieces that really kind of inspired this project and kind of was like, a kind of ongoing mantra throughout the whole process of writing. It is my words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamonix, subtitled, Performing Transgender Rage. And that was also kind of how I came to see the book, as a kind of refusal, as a rejection, as a saying, you know, like, yeah, I am going to argue with biology and. Right. Because that's, like, one of the things that we're not supposed to question. And a lot of, you know, like, other work and even a lot of trans stuff will kind of concede the point of, like, sex. Sex is the biological thing. Sex is, you know, you know, to quote the. Or maybe to misquote, I don't know. The like, gender bred person that was popular in like 2013 is like, sex is like what's in your pants? And just being like, no, it's not. I think that, yeah, is kind of what kept the book going even as it was really intensely difficult to spend hours and hours and hours face to face with sources that I could see myself in of being like, ah, yes, I would be the person in this hideously invasive photograph attached to a case study if I had been born 120 years ago or something. And that was exhausting. But it was also, you know, necessary, so very important.
- [83:24]
Clayton Gerard
So thank you so much for doing all of that, so important, like historical archival research and like bringing that together in this book and this like, very complex, intricate, yet very important and meaningful book. So thank you so much for, you know, bringing that book into the world and thank you for being willing to sit here and talk with me about all the important contributions that you're making. And yeah, I really appreciate it.
- [83:52]
Beans Veloci
Thanks. Thanks for having me.