Sociologists and the Clinic: The Advent of Racialized Gender in Intersex/Trans Medicine

Recent scholarship has highlighted how the history of “gender” as an analytic concept within the English-speaking academy originated in the treatment of intersex and transsexual patients in the mid-twentieth-century United States. When faced with the instability of “sex” embodied by intersex and later trans patients, “gender” was used as a means to stabilize the binary through racialized logics. In this article I trace sociology’s part in moving “gender” from the intersex clinic to feminist scholarship. I begin with a discussion of gender’s origins, focusing on the work of John Money and the Hampsons at Johns Hopkins, Robert Stoller at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and early feminist sociologists who drew upon their work. I then turn to Garfinkel’s Agnes Case Study and its application by West and Zimmerman in their “Doing Gender” paradigm to illustrate how the racialized logics of trans/intersex medicine continue to impact how we study gender within sociology today.