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Foreword Generalizations of femaleness and maleness have long served as tools to enforce social order. Regardless of the details, which would certainly di=er from tribe to tribe, from culture to culture, through language, and be influenced by geographic and economic conditions, the categorization of sexed human bodies and the interpretation of gendered identities and expressions have benefited some people and oppressed others for as long as human beings have told the stories of their lives. It is astounding to me that it has taken our society so long to listen to these stories. I can’t imagine that they weren’t being told, but I can imagine that they were suppressed , and that this was likely often done with great violence. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the nascent sciences of sexology and psychology/psychiatry held sway over the definition of “normal” sexual and gendered behavior in Europe, America, and everywhere their influence could reach. By naming and classifying behaviors , and by creating a system of “deviations,” and even criminalizing variance (“deviations” that caused no harm to person or property), the masters of these belief systems exerted a new level of control with which they intended—consciously or unconsciously, benignly or o

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