Who is Who in Sexuality & Gender

A Hanoverian jurist who, writing to his own family in 1862 and publishing from 1864, made the first sustained argument that same-sex desire is congenital rather than vicious — and who put the burden of proof on the majority to demonstrate what it had only ever assumed. He is the founding text of two lineages this department separates, and of their confusion.

Can help you study: The shifting of a burden of proof, the decomposition of sex into independently varying parts, early legal reform argument, and how an existence proof works.

The Viennese forensic psychiatrist whose Psychopathia Sexualis ran to twelve editions and whose central distinction — disease or vice — was meant to save defendants from the courts by moving them into medicine. He was the man Ulrichs wrote to, and he granted the congenital while refusing the leap to the physiological.

Can help you study: The case-history method, the disease/vice distinction, degeneration theory, the Latin veil and who a book is written for, and the asymmetric burden of proof.

The English physician who noticed that everything his profession knew about inversion had been learned in asylums and prisons, and who therefore went and found the others — people in ordinary employment, in good health, unknown to any doctor. From them he argued that abnormal and diseased are two studies and not one. He was prosecuted for saying so in plain English.

Can help you study: The sampling critique, the distinction between anomaly and pathology, comparative method, and the cost of writing for a general reader.

The Berlin dermatologist who coined Sexualwissenschaft and made the sharpest version of the argument against his own field: that a science built out of the hospital and the consulting-room is a magnificent structure resting on a sampling error, and that the remedy is not a better clinic but leaving the room altogether.

Can help you study: The anthropological turn in sexology, the critique of degeneration theory, encyclopaedic method, and the question where else, and when else?

Founder of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, and the man who built an institution on the proposition that justice would follow from science. His doctrine of sexual intermediaries held variation to be continuous and biological rather than categorical and deviant. His library was burned in 1933. He is cross-listed here from the Institut collection.

Can help you study: The theory of sexual intermediaries, science offered as legal argument, the Institut and its work, and what happens to a research programme when the state objects to it.

An abstraction of the argument, not a portrait of the man. The endocrinologist whose 1966 book supplied the criteria the gender clinics then used, and who said openly that he had no test — nothing in the blood or the chromosomes distinguished his patients from anyone else. What he had instead was fifty-one cases and one governing question: what becomes of this person if we do nothing?

Can help you study: Diagnosis in the absence of a test, the reversible-before-irreversible principle, scaling as a clinical device, and how a criterion becomes a gate.

Head of the Institut’s department for the psychic suffering produced by sexuality — not the sexuality itself, but the collision between what a person was and what the world required. He held that treating a mind is not the same act as treating a brain, a behaviour or a symptom, and that which of those you believe you are doing decides everything after. Cross-listed from the Institut collection.

Can help you study: The philosophical foundations of psychotherapy, sexual distress as a medical rather than a legal matter, and Weimar clinical psychology.

An entomologist before he was a sexologist, and the method was settled on gall wasps eighteen years before it was pointed at people: count everything, and never discard the specimen that does not fit. He observed that the older workers made a practice of throwing their exceptions into the waste basket, and he spent his life on the contents of that basket.

Can help you study: Taxonomic method and individual variation, the seven-point scale, the difference between incidence and frequency, and what a sample can and cannot support.

He ran the Institut’s sex education and marriage counselling clinic, through which thousands passed — workers, women, the very young — wanting to understand their own bodies. His position was that they had not arrived ignorant by accident: the ignorance had been arranged, and knowledge was therefore the first medicine. Cross-listed from the Institut collection.

Can help you study: The history of sex education, the Weimar counselling clinics, and popular scientific writing as a political act.

He documented among the first gender-affirming surgeries performed anywhere, and wrote the forensic opinions that allowed people to live in their true sex under law — which was, in practice, the more powerful of his two instruments. He worked quietly and the work was not quiet. Cross-listed from the Institut collection.

Can help you study: The earliest gender surgery and its documentation, expert testimony as an instrument of protection, and the Weimar transvestite certificate.

An abstraction of the argument, not a portrait of the man. He borrowed gender from the grammarians because medicine had no word for what he was looking at, and held that sex is not one variable but a chain of links that can come apart. This is a contested position and the case against it is carried inside the simulacrum, at full strength, in his own terms — including the consent principle he authored and the criterion by which his own most-cited case fails.

Can help you study: The sequence of determinants, how a coinage moves a subject from one jurisdiction to another, naturalised norms in scientific dress, and how to examine a protocol whose subjects could not consent.

An abstraction of the argument, not a portrait of the man. He split sex from gender deliberately and then declined to defend the coinage, printed the strongest objection to his own key term on his own third page and left it unanswered, and gave as much space to how we look as to what is found. His ladder — prejudice, guess, proposition, testable hypothesis, law of nature — is the most useful instrument in this section.

Can help you study: Placing a claim on a rung before discussing it, the method half of a book, why a few well-chosen examples counterfeit a class, and the limits of clinical evidence stated by a clinician.

An abstraction of a clinical method, not a portrait of two people — and it speaks in the plural, because the instrument was two people working as one. Its premises: that there is no uninvolved partner in a marriage carrying sexual dysfunction; that neither sex can know the other’s experience from the inside, so each side of the room needs an interpreter; that control of a session belongs to the cotherapist who is not talking; and that since nobody can define therapeutic success without prejudice, the only number worth publishing is the failure rate.

Can help you study: Treating a relationship rather than a person, cotherapy design, why reported success rates deserve three questions before they deserve discussion, and what independent reproducibility asks of a clinical claim.

Based on the published writings of a living author, and abstracted from them: this is a topology of an argument, not a portrait of a person. Its central find is a closed circuit — the clinics published a criterion; the candidates read it and supplied the matching account; the papers reporting the match secured the funding. It took several years to see, and the reply it produced founded a field.

Can help you study: How a diagnostic category gets assembled and by whom, recursive criteria, what a test forbids you to say, and turning an accusation into a method.

Based on the published writings of a living author, and abstracted from them: a topology of an argument, not a portrait of a person. It separates the sex of the people someone is drawn to from who someone understands themselves to be, and tests a statute at the point where the two are hardest to tell apart. It is a contested position, and the strongest objections to it are carried inside the simulacrum in its own terms — including the objection drawn from its author’s own history.

Can help you study: The orientation/identity distinction, reading a statute at its hard case, comparing worst cases rather than likelihoods, and why non-directiveness is difficult to specify.

Based on the published writings of a living author, and abstracted from them: a topology of an argument, not a portrait of a person. Two moves define it. Faced with a category and the case it handles worst, it refuses the question of whether the case belongs and asks instead what the category becomes once the case is standing in it. And faced with a question that loses on the numbers, it concedes the arithmetic completely and then changes the measure — not how many people identify with a question, but how many other questions it can be joined to.

Can help you study: Categories read from their hardest cases, defining a term by movement rather than destination, the historian’s backward move, intersectional argument built from a located standpoint, and stating the limits of a standpoint as precisely as its reach.

The New Ethic: sexuality governed by love and consent rather than by legal marriage, and the double standard of sexual morality read as a political structure rather than a natural one. She founded the League for the Protection of Mothers to give practical support to the women the law refused to protect, which is why she belongs to this section rather than to the clinical one — her object is the organisation of power, not the diagnosis of a patient.

Can help you study: Early feminist sexual ethics, consent as a organising principle, the double standard as political structure, and the link between pacifism and sexual reform.

He appears twice in this department by design. In the clinical section he is a psychoanalyst arguing about evidence; here he is the origin of the sex/gender distinction itself — the move on which the whole of this lineage’s subsequent argument is built, made by a man who would not have recognised most of what was built on it.

Can help you study: Where the sex/gender distinction came from and what it was originally for, the epistemic ladder from prejudice to law of nature, and the limits of clinical evidence about emotion.

The argument that classical cinema structures looking as masculine and being-looked-at as feminine — and that the structure is in the apparatus, in the camera and the cut, rather than in the intentions of anyone making the film. It is the clearest instance in the department of a feminist analysis that locates power in form rather than in content.

Can help you study: Reading a formal apparatus for the position it assigns its viewer, scopophilia and identification, and what a counter-cinema would have to do differently.

Against the use of ‘patriarchy’ as a single undifferentiated thing: six structures — paid work, housework, the state, violence, sexuality and culture — each with its own logic, interacting, and shifting historically from a private to a public form. The move is decomposition, and it is what makes the concept testable rather than merely denunciatory.

Can help you study: Decomposing a totalising concept into structures that can vary independently, the private-to-public shift, and how to make a political concept do empirical work.

Gender treated not as something a pupil is but as something constructed in the classroom daily — and the ‘boys’ underachievement’ debate taken apart to ask whose achievement is being measured, against whose standard, and what the aggregate statistic conceals about class and ethnicity.

Can help you study: Gender as a daily construction rather than an attribute, interrogating an educational statistic, and how a moral panic is assembled from real numbers.

The classroom as a location of possibility, and the insistence that a theory which cannot be spoken plainly to the people it concerns has failed on its own terms. She is here because her feminism is inseparable from her account of who is in the room and who is not, which is the question this section keeps returning to.

Can help you study: Engaged pedagogy, the demand that theory remain accountable to those it describes, presence and vulnerability in teaching, and who is missing from a discussion.

He stands at the head of both lineages, which is precisely the confusion this department exists to separate. In the clinical section he is the origin of a taxonomy; here he is the first man to publish a defence of his own kind under his own name, and the writer every apologist in this section had read.

Can help you study: The first-person apologetic tradition, the shifting of a burden of proof, and why one text can found two fields that later disagree.

A Renaissance historian and Greek scholar — not a physician — who read the whole medical and forensic literature of sexual inversion in four languages and found it methodologically incompetent. His instruments are a layman’s: ask from what post a witness was looking and what his position forbade him to notice; ask whether a theory could have come out any other way; and hold a phenomenon constant while varying the society that judges it, since a classification that moves with the opinion is a classification of the opinion. He printed both essays in editions of ten and a hundred copies.

Can help you study: Testing a classification for invariance, detecting an unfalsifiable theory, separating a symptom from the conditions that produced it, dating a text apart from its reception, and dividing a category before defending it.

A Cambridge mathematician who became a curate, then neither, then a market gardener and socialist pamphleteer. He read the Continental science and wrote it into English for the public it had been addressed away from — and made two moves nobody else in the section makes. He refuses to defend anything as merely harmless, asking instead what work it does that the society could not do without; and he answers the doctors not by asserting health but by tracking which way their own concessions were moving, year by year, and predicting where they would arrive. One of the five papers in his 1908 book concerns children and is deliberately excluded from this simulacrum, which says so itself.

Can help you study: Finding the inhabited middle of a binary, arguing from the trajectory of expert opinion rather than asserting a verdict, moving a case from harmlessness to function, distinguishing jurisdiction from approval in law, and why concealment rather than desire may be the corrupting agent.

The documentary historian of the section, and the counterweight to the two apologists who precede him. Working from state papers, household accounts and conduct books rather than from published argument, he shows that the signs of the admired masculine friendship and the signs of the execrated sodomite were one set of signs — the shared bed, the embrace, the common table — so that an accusation adds nothing and works instead by subtraction, withholding the conventions that would have made the intimacy legible as innocent. The meaning is in what is missing.

Can help you study: Reading a document by what it withholds rather than what it reports, dating the social conditions that make a reading credible, distinguishing a manipulable code from an automatic mentality, and what an accusation does to a career that is quite separate from whether it is true.

The ancestor rather than the member. The proposition that sexuality is produced by the discourses that claim to describe it — that the nineteenth century did not discover the homosexual but manufactured him as a species — is the hinge on which this whole section turns, and every theorist still to be built here is answering it, extending it, or refusing it.

Can help you study: Genealogy as a method, the productive rather than repressive account of power, how a category comes into being with the discourse that names it, and the mechanisms by which knowledge and power constitute each other.

The other ancestor, and the one who arrived at the section’s central habit from a different direction: the tolerance for ambiguity, the refusal to resolve a contradiction that is doing work, and the border understood as a way of thinking rather than a line. She writes from a position rather than about one, which is why the theoretical lineage that followed could not simply absorb her.

Can help you study: Holding contradictions without resolving them, writing from a located position, code-switching as an argument rather than a style, and the borderland as an epistemology.