February 3, 2026 at 5:30 PM

Sex Isn't Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary

Sex Isn't Real examines the multiple, conflicting enactments of sex produced by scientists and clinicians in the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Beans Velocci argues that cisness is not a natural state and provides a new pathway for historians to consider all sex and gender, not only that specified as trans, as equally contingent. Using deep and extensive archival research, the book traces "sex" across five sites-zoology and agricultural science, eugenics, gynecology, statistical sexology, and transgender medicine-as increasingly divergent manifestations accrued to it. Velocci shows that across fields, unruly bodies were recaptured into normative male and female categories without any fundamental reconsideration of the system of categorization or the duty, right or ability of science to serve as arbiter of such categories. Sex Isn't Real utilizes sources such as correspondence, lab notes, administrative records, case histories, and published texts to explicate the near-limitless capacity for tolerating contradiction that enabled the persistent deployment of sex as a set of neatly defined male and female categories. As a work of trans history, the book interrogates the assumption that most people fit into stable binary sex categories and that trans people are the aberration, placing trans history at the center of work on gender, sex and sexuality broadly.

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