Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex (review)

In Bodies in Doubt, early American historian Elizabeth Reis examines the changes and continuities in how physicians, patients, and national culture interpret anomalous bodies, and argues that “[t]o uncover the hidden history of intersex is to expose both early American and later attitudes toward sexual normality and difference” (p. 22). Unlike most existing studies of intersex, which focus on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this slim (216 pp.) volume offers a longer view, examining what Reis sees as the main paradigms through which intersex has been understood from the seventeenth century to the present. For early Americans, nonconforming bodies were viewed as monstrous, an “impermissible category of gender” (p. 13) that documented divine wrath and called for legal management. By the early nineteenth century, a new medical-scientific discourse was taking over, characterized by anxious attention to sudden changes of sex. Reis persuasively connects this concern to a national obsession with the possibility of racial change, linking public and expert fears of different types of out-of-control bodies. By the turn of the twentieth century, a primary concern that observers attached to intersex bodies was their capacity for same-sex sexual behavior. Spurred by the rise of sexology and, eventually, the possibility of surgical and hormonal intervention, a national “impetus to maintain a two-sex system” (p. 53) emerged that would dominate the definition and treatment of intersex bodies for the next generations. Reis’s final chapters address the establishment of John Money’s protocol for managing sex and gender and the challenges to that paradigm from a new wave of intersex activists.

As Reis moves from one era to the next, she continually reminds us how much national culture, physicians’ needs and options, and political concerns helped to shape the changing meaning of intersex. Throughout, she skillfully traces shifts in the popular and expert meanings assigned to anomalous bodies. At various moments, observers charged intersex Americans primarily with blasphemy, dissembling, homosexuality, or avoiding conventional heterosexual marriage. Medical models also changed dramatically over this long time span, with experts looking variously to gendered behaviors, genital morphology, gonadal structure, hormones, and psychology to determine an individual’s “true” sex, with a surprising few attending to the subject’s own wishes and desires.

The most valuable contribution of Bodies in Doubt is Reis’s concise examination of how successive questions and answers about intersex bodies reflected different eras’ dominant concerns and anxieties about sex, gender, bodies, and the possibilities of science. Even as a primarily religious model for understanding anomalous bodies gave way to other discourses (legal, medical/scientific, feminist, etc.), certain questions recurred: did “true” hermaphrodites exist? Were intersex bodies likely to engage in deviant behaviors? And, most pressing for medical experts with access to new treatments, what determined an anomalous individual’s “real” sex?

Reis’s study is useful precisely because of her broad brush—it promises to broaden early Americanists’ conversations about sexuality and gender and could serve useful not only in courses on the history of sexuality, but in classes on medicine, gender, the history of bodies, and disability studies. Many important moments in intersex history receive more detailed attention elsewhere, but the author’s goals of extending our thinking about intersex to an earlier era and linking often separate moments and issues are well realized in this engrossingly readable overview.