A01=Beans Velocci
Author_Beans Velocci
categories
Category=JBSF3
Category=JBSJ
Category=NHTB
Category=PDX
Charles Davenport
cis trans binary
Cold Spring Harbor
Elmer Belt
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
eugenics
Eugenics Record Office
evolution
female
genitalia
gynecology
Harry Benjamin
heredity
hermaphroditism
history of science
intersex
Kinsey Reports
male
R. W. Shufeldt
Robert Latou Dickinson
science
Sex
sex categories
sexology
sexual reversal
Standards of Care
Station for Experimental Evolution
sterilization
strategic incoherence
trans care bans
trans history
transgender
transsexuality
Product details
- ISBN 9781478033028
- Weight: 440g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 03 Feb 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Sex Isn’t Real, Beans Velocci 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, Velocci follows scientists and clinicians from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth 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 in 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 their binarily sexed body, Velocci demonstrates that it is not cis people who fit the categories; it’s the categories that flex to make them fit.
Beans Velocci is Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
