The Edges of Gender
Thursday, January 29, 2026 - 09:00
Ouch! I hadn't meant to skip posting blogs while I was traveling, but somehow I got distracted, despite having everything lined up and ready to go. It might seem strange that I spend so much attention on research into historic intersex issues, given that my topic is lesbianism. I'll discuss the "why" in detail in my book, but the simple explanation is that ambiguous gender creates a context for understanding how people defined and reacted to gender anomaly. And one of the historic attitudes toward same-sex desire was that it was a gender anomaly, rather than a sexual orientation.
Major category:
Full citation:
Mara-McKay, Nico. 2018. “Becoming Gendered: Two Medieval Approaches to Intersex Gender Assignment” in Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies vol. 7, no. 1.
This is a fairly superficial paper comparing differing approaches to assigning gender to intersex people within Christian and Islamic contexts in the pre-modern period. (It’s an undergraduate paper, so the lack of depth is understandable.)
Although the default situation was for gender to be assigned at birth and remain fixed and stable across a person’s lifetime, in the case of intersex people, the assignment of gender might be delayed or reanalyzed (and potentially reassigned) later in life. Approaches to this analysis and assignment are discussed in theological, medical, and legal texts and had significant social and legal consequences for the individual.
The paper notes that the standard terms used in medieval texts for intersex people are “hermaphrodite” or “androgyne” but that these terms had a broader scope and application than specifically people with ambiguous anatomy, also covering behavioral attributes that were considered to cross gender categories.
The article reviews historic theories of gender development (one- and two-sex models) and how they affected whether intersex conditions were considered “natural” or monstrous.
Roman/Christian law codes typically specified that intersex people were to be assigned to “the sex which predominates,” generally in terms of anatomical development, but sometimes taking into account behavioral characteristics. Once assigned a gender, a person was not permitted to change unless a legal proceeding determined that the original assignment was in error. One significant concern in assigning gender was to avoid the possibility of sodomy. Anecdotes are given of cases where gender was reassigned later in life due to new information about the person’s anatomy.
Islamic law was concerned with maintaining gender segregation in society, however as children were not considered sexual beings under Islam, in completely ambiguous cases, gender assignment could be delayed until puberty. There were also possible arrangements for an intersex person to literally occupy a space between male spaces and female spaces in social contexts, to maintain appropriate separation, however if no clear evidence was available the person was usually classified as female.
Time period:
Place:
View comments (0)