Impossible Hermaphrodites: Intersex in America, 1620-1960

Abstract

In 1840 the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal published an article about a purported hermaphrodite who had lived some years as male and some as female. The author, a physician, described the subject's ambiguous features: long, black hair arranged in a “feminine mode,” a face with “masculine coarseness” but with “a feminine complexion,” facial hair like a man, but earrings like a woman. Rumor had it that s/he performed the copulative functions of either sex. Despite the ambiguity of indicators, the doctor expressed no doubt about his subject's sex and portrayed “him” as unequivocally disingenuous, as the perpetrator of a “case of imposture.” Although the individual presented herself as female, the doctor pronounced her male.1 What are we to make of this perplexing person? Was she a woman attired in men's clothes, as so many supposed and she herself insisted? Was she truly a man, equipped with “male organs entire,” as two doctors observed? Did the “piece of dead flesh” she referred to on her body make her female or male?2 Why did she variously live life as a woman or a man? Why did the doctor feel entitled to pronounce her male, even as she presented herself as female?