Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 354 - Why is Intersexuality Relevant to the History of Lesbianism? - transcript
(Originally aired 2026/10/17)
Content Note
Let’s start with a content note. Historic discussions of intersexuality have a hard time avoiding the word “hermaphrodite,” which today is considered offensive when applied to intersex persons. However, in historic use, “hermaphrodite” was used in a variety of contexts to indicate combinations of masculine and feminine attributes and applied to the entire spectrum of sex, gender, and sexuality. This could include people with ambiguous genitalia, but also people who combined aspects of performative gender assigned to both men and women, or who performed gender attributes not matching their assigned sex. Pre-modern gender theory did not clearly distinguish these concepts. I acknowledge that the use of the word “hermaphrodite” in the context of intersexuality is considered offensive today and apologize for any harm that discussing the historic usage may cause for readers. As the historic use of the word applies to a semantic complex for which there is no neutral corresponding term today, it’s hard to avoid the word entirely.
As usual, I’ve focused this discussion on Western, largely Christian culture in keeping with the primary focus of the Project. As intersex is a natural, rather than a cultural, phenomenon, every culture can be expected to have some way of recognizing and addressing it. There is an extensive discussion of intersexuality in Xie’s dissertation on historic Chinese attitudes toward gender deviations. DeVun includes discussions of intersex within Jewish and Arabic traditions. As the topic is tangential to the focus of the Project, I haven’t specifically sought out work on other cultures.
Discussion
So why is intersexuality relevant to the history of lesbianism?
Within a cultural context where physiological sex, performative gender, and sexual preference are expected to march in parallel, any deviation from the expected alignment is a social disruption. People causing such disruptions have, at various times, been classified as “hermaphrodites” although different eras emphasized different aspects of the equation, and other labels are also possible. Interpretations of, and reactions to, such deviations will either stigmatize the individual (variously as sinful, monstrous, criminal, diseased, or some other framing) or will attempt to reanalyze the deviation to restore the expected alignment in a way that requires the least cognitive dissonance. For example, it might be argued that the sex assignment was incorrect, or that the gender performance was due to economic reasons.
If we take as a fixed frame of reference a situation that produces the appearance of same-sex desire between women, then we can explore how the society handles deviations of performative gender or physiological sex. Deviations of performative gender fall more under the topic of female masculinity and are out of scope for this episode. Deviations of physiological sex correspond loosely to intersexuality and raise questions of how sex is identified and categorized. Historic debates around the nature and sexual classification of intersex people can shed light on cultural understandings of “who is a woman?” and “what does it mean to be of the same sex?” as well as the question “who gets to decide?”
While modern classification as intersex can encompass issues of anatomy, chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs, prior to the 20th century (and the ability to identify chromosomal and hormonal factors), sex classification was focused on visible genitalia and secondary sex characteristics, with behavioral aspects brought in when those failed to provide a clear answer. More specialized considerations of internal anatomy began to be available around the 19th century. Most academic studies of the history of sex difference don’t address intersexuality in any meaningful way, lumping in anatomical ambiguity with behavioral gender transgression (such as cross-dressing or homosexuality) but we can trace historic attitudes toward intersexuality within those studies.
Common visible intersex conditions might manifest as a smaller than typical penis or an enlarged clitoris, or a combination of an apparent penis of some size with an apparent vaginal opening, though not necessarily large enough to enable penetrative sex, or some other variation. There is a much wider range of less visible intersex conditions, but these are less likely to have contributed to pre-20th century ideas about sex and gender. While estimates of the prevalence of intersex conditions vary widely, they are common enough to justify historic models of sex trying to account for the phenomenon.
The “one-sex” model of sexual difference, originating in classical times, allowed for a sliding scale of categorization, with male at one end, female at the other end, and various types of intermediate or ambiguous bodies and behaviors in between. Intermediate forms under this model of sexual differentiation were not identical to the classical idea of the “androgyne”—a perfect melding of male and female—but rather represented a failure to adhere to the ideals of purely male or purely female. Although the one-sex model wasn’t systematically displaced in medical theory until the early modern period, philosophical debates during the 12th century tackled the question of just how to draw dividing lines and whether “hermaphrodites” represented an intermediate state or an entirely separate “third sex.” To some extent, these debates, rather than undermining a gender binary, called for stricter gender boundaries (a situation that would recur in the 19th century). Regardless of the difficulty in classifying ambiguous bodies, it was considered essential to have a metric for doing so, as sex classification was the basis for social and legal identity.
Because of this surge of interest in “hermaphrodites” in the 12th century (which would wane in following centuries before reviving in the 16th century), we can examine a snapshot of the attitudes of various parts of medieval society. Medical writings tended to accept a three-sex model, including a “neither male nor female” category based on anatomy. Theological writings—concerned with the possibility of sodomy—declined to recognize a formal “third sex” and assigned a sexual category based on sexual response and capacity. Someone who was sexually “more active” could be classified as a man, or if “more passive,” as a woman. But if they “failed” at this classification they were not allowed to switch and must instead remain celibate.
While philosophy and medicine allowed space to debate the fuzziness of sex and gender categories, the law had no such luxury. It recognized only two sexes and enforced clear and drastic differences in what rights the two had. No one could escape the requirement to be legally classified as either male or female. Roman law—which continued to influence European legal systems throughout the middle ages—held that an intersex person would be classified according to the “preponderance of their traits” with a focus on anatomy, but it remained fairly silent on the question of who would make that classification. Various approaches were taken in various contexts to make this assignment, based on the appearance or functionality of the genitals, and sometimes taking into account behavioral gender factors, if anatomy provided no clear guide.
Assignment into a sex category could be particularly fraught if the question arose later in life. Some intersex conditions only become apparent at puberty, when a female-appearing body develops more masculine-appearing genitals, or when a body that appeared to be an under-developed male began to menstruate. Such cases are likely to have contributed to the belief prevalent in classical and medieval times that bodies could change physiological sex. In some cases, this was thought to be a random and spontaneous occurrence, but there was an associated belief that cross-gender behavior could result in a change of corresponding sex.
Classical and medieval authorities concurred that spontaneous change of sex was almost always from female to male, explained as nature moving from the imperfect (female) to the perfect (male). While behavior-mediated sex change could, in theory, occur in either direction, the vast majority of the examples cited in the literature are from female to male. Traces of a belief in behavior-driven sex change can be found as late as the 19th century when women were discouraged from participating in male-coded activities for fear it would affect their reproductive capacity.
While some such sex-change narratives may have been inventions, there are conditions that manifest as a child appearing to have anatomy associated with one sex, but on puberty developing sexual characteristics of a different sex. For example, the genetic condition 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency can result in a chromosomally XY infant being classified as female, but then developing more typically male genitals at puberty. As a recessive genetic trait, this condition might appear randomly in the population and could easily have been the inspiration for a belief in spontaneous female-to-male sex change.
In an environment where the idea of such changes was accepted, some people may have claimed to have undergone a sex change even when not supported by their anatomy, either to live as a man (gender identity) or to engage in socially acceptable relations with a woman (sexual preference). In 16th century Spain, Elena de Céspedes (after marrying a man and bearing a child) took on the name Eleno and began living as a man, including marrying a woman. When questions later arose about their identity, Eleno justified their actions by claiming to have developed male genitals that were later lost in an accident.
Official interest in cases of intersexuality focused around two concerns: reproduction and same-sex relations. From the medieval period up through the 20th century, investigations into proper sex categorization were often raised due to the perceived inability of one partner in a marriage to fulfill the expected sexual role of their assigned sex. (This concern could be driven by male impotence as well as by anatomical concerns.) The annulment of a marriage due to reproductive incapacity sometimes involved re-categorizing the person’s sex, but sometimes simply concluded that they couldn’t perform adequately according to their correctly-assigned sex, or that it was impossible to determine a correct sex classification.
A separate concern was that, due to mis-classification, someone was inadvertently engaging in same-sex acts. The flip side of this concern was that an incorrect re-classification of someone’s sex might result in same-sex acts. As a general rule, a person was only allowed one sex reclassification. Acting as the “wrong” sex was forgivable before the matter had been adjudicated, but a second reassignment meant the person had been knowingly and willfully acting as the “wrong” sex. If they had engaged in marriage or sexual relations in both sexual categories, that raised moral questions as well as legal ones.
A clear-cut case of intersexuality which raised both concerns was recorded in 17th century Virginia when Thomas or Thomasine Hall was challenged due to a history of having sexual relations with both men and women and having lived alternately as a woman and a man. A medical examination confirmed Hall’s claim to be both male and female, leaving the law befuddled as to how to classify them, though the record indicates that the concern was more about gender transgression than about which of Hall’s sexual activities was problematic.
Beginning around the 16th century, and especially within medical circles, another topic that brought lesbianism and intersexuality into overlap was the renewed fascination with the clitoris as a sexual organ and the association of clitoral enlargement with sex between women. (This is an entire topic on its own and there will be a podcast about it eventually.) Factual reports of intersex people who combined female-appearing genitals with a micro-penis are likely to have contributed to the idea of the “macro-clitoral lesbian,” but the latter image took on a life of its own. When reading reports and case histories from earlier eras, it isn’t always possible to determine whether the subject of the discussion is intersex, or whether the observer is ignorant of the range of anatomical variation, or whether non-normative behavior is being reinterpreted as non-normative anatomy. There are numerous cases of apparent female same-sex desire being a trigger for investigating one of the partners to see if they had masculine-appearing anatomy, as in the early 17th century case of Marie or Marin le Marcis who was acquitted from a charge of “female sodomy” by a doctor’s opinion that Marcis had sufficiently masculine anatomy to explain desire for a woman, but not sufficient to be legally classified as a man. (Marcis was then legally forbidden from having sexual relations with either sex, to avoid any possibility of same-sex relations.) One motivation for attributing (apparent) female same-sex desire to “hermaphroditic” anatomy, was the ability to reclassify such people as a type of “third sex,” thus excluding the possibility that “normal women” could have same-sex desires.
This approach faded with the rise of the “two sex model,” under which male and female were considered to be entirely separate states of being. The theory was that everyone clearly had an underlying “true sex” that must be determined, rather than allowing that someone might be intermediate between the sexes and assigned to a category based on a best fit, or to a third category entirely. Previously there was some latitude for considering a person’s social presentation or even personal preference. Some medieval jurisdictions allowed an intersex person to swear to which sex they would live as, rather than being assigned a sex by the authorities. But under the two sex model, medical expertise began to claim jurisdiction over questions of sex categorization.
Advances in the study of anatomy and improved understandings of the biology of reproduction in the later 18th and 19th centuries pared away some of the mythology around intersexuality, without disrupting the idea that everyone had an underlying “true sex” and that there was a physiological basis to gender identity. It continued to be the case that people who deviated from a normative alignment of sex, gender, and sexual preference were perceived as a problem to be solved, but the issue was interpreted in new ways. The “masturbation panic” of the 18th century introduced the idea that what appeared to be a penis-like clitoris could be caused by masturbation rather than being evidence of a male body. At the same time, the prior belief that a naturally-occurring enlarged clitoris (or micro-penis) indicated an intermediate or “third” sex was redirected toward a need to classify the body unambiguously as male or female. Even as medical publications spread awareness of the reality of intersex conditions, they were still treated as a problem to be solved.
The increasing medical acceptance of intersexuality was deployed to try to avoid recognizing same-sex desire. Witness the 18th century French case of Anne or Jean-Baptiste Grandjean who, after growing up unquestioned as female, was instructed by their confessor to live socially as a man due to having expressed sexual desire for women. Several years after marrying a woman, this transgender solution was rejected by a court who convicted Grandjean of “contempt for the sacrament of marriage.” On appeal, Grandjean’s lawyer used a claim that his client was intersex (a claim that had not been made in prior medical examinations) as a defense. The multiple medical examinations of Grandjean came to different conclusions, leaving the truth of the matter unclear, but the point was that a reassignment of sex category—or at least a legal recognition of ambiguity—would have been the only acceptable defense for the marriage.
In the 19th century, the French situation became more complicated because the Napoleonic law code required all infants to have their sex registered within three days of birth, but also made no allowance for any classification other than male or female. This made France central to medical debates over how to classify ambiguous bodies. Doctors developed elaborate and contradictory strategies for determining an official sex assignment, while the law courts had to deal with the consequences of initial sex assignment of infants that were later called into question.
Outside of France, references to a “third sex” could encompass intersex people as well as developing sexological theories around same-sex desire. By the 19th century, intersexuality was starting to go out of fashion as an assumed explanation for gender crossing. But once a person was identified as intersex, that fact might be applied retroactively as explanation for all manner of deviations from expected gendered behavior. The case studies offer a detailed catalog of the attributes and behaviors that were considered to be biologically tied to sex. Sexologists introduced the idea that this physiologically-based gender identity could be at odds with one’s apparent anatomy, which developed into the idea of “gender inversion,” while still assuming that gender identity drove sexual preference. Sexology set out to develop a scientific approach to questions of sex, gender, and sexuality but continued to treat the three as hopelessly intertwined.
Returning to the question of “how is intersexuality relevant to lesbianism,” we must consider the core historic prototype. Sex, gender, and sexual desire were expected to align in specific ways. For much of Western history, these three topics were not treated as distinct. Although we can find language discussing anatomical sex, behavioral gender, and sexual preference, they were not considered to be independent characteristics. Similarly, although historic cultures recognized and described deviations from the default alignment, those deviations were not “bundled” into the same identity categories that have developed across the 20th century. So, for example, the term “hermaphrodite” could refer to any misalignment. Where today’s approach might refer to a deviation of sexual preference as “homosexual,” a deviation of gender as “transgender,” and a deviation of sex as “intersex” (as a vast oversimplification), these were not necessarily meaningfully distinct categories prior to the turn of the 20th century.
The attribution of masculinity to women who desired women was the flip side of the authorities using desire for women as evidence for masculinity in intersex persons. The attitudes are thoroughly intertwined. When doctors and other professionals trying to assign sex to an ambiguous body prioritized avoiding the appearance of authorizing same-sex desire, we can see a reflection of how some unambiguously female bodies were assigned masculine gender in order to make sense of their desire for other female bodies. The people with those female bodies might embrace or reject that assignment of masculinity, but the pressure was there. Similarly, when behavioral attributes like “enjoying active sports” or “having a scientific mind” were considered diagnostic when evaluating cases of unclear sex, we can better understand why women in history might label themselves “masculine” for similar interests without necessarily experiencing what we would understand today as gender dysphoria. All of this complicates the historic analysis of same-sex and same-gender desire. Thus we can see that exploring the intersection of lesbianism and intersexuality helps in identifying the underlying cultural assumptions and models that shape both social attitudes towards lesbianism and the self-understanding that women may have had about their own identities and desires.
References
Brown, Kathleen. 1995. “’Changed...into the Fashion of a Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:2 pp.171-193.
Burshatin, Israel. “Elena Alias Eleno: Genders, Sexualities, and ‘Race’ in the Mirror of Natural History in Sixteenth-Century Spain” in Ramet, Sabrina Petra (ed). 1996. Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. Routledge, London. ISBN 0-415-11483-7
DeVun, Leah. 2020. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-2311-9551-5
Donoghue, Emma. 1993. “Imagined More than Women: Lesbians as Hermaphrodites” in Women’s History Review 2:2 199-216.
Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0-674-54349-1
Linton, Anne E. 2022. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4
Manion, Jen. 2020. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-108-48380-3
Nederman, Cary J. and Jacqui True. 1996. “The Third Sex: The Idea of the Hermaphrodite in Twelfth-Century Europe” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:4: 497-517.
Vermeil. 1765. Mémoire pour Anne Grandjean. Louis Cellot, Paris.
Xie, Wenjuan. 2015. (Trans)Culturally Transgendered: Reading Transgender Narratives in (Late) Imperial China. Dissertation.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- Historic understandings of intersexuality
- The intertwined models of sex, gender, and sexual preference
- How avoiding homosexuality drove approaches to intersex sex assignment
- This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Intersex
- A list of references can be found in the transcript
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
Links to Heather Online
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