Gender reassignment surgery in the 18th century: A case study

Abstract

In 1779, Mr Thomas Brand surgically reassigned the gender of a seven-year-old child from female to male, thus enabling him to urinate standing up, wear trousers, and enjoy the privileges of being a male. This case study, published in London in 1787, illuminates 18th-century debates over gender, sexual ambiguity, and medical theories and practices. Mr Brand, Surgeon, uses his case study to claim that the body is two-sexed, and that hermaphrodism is a fiction. He proposes that the anatomical knowledge and practices of surgeons such as himself are superior to those of higher-status physicians. Mr Brand does not have a lot to say about his patient or her/his parents, except to conclude that if the patient had been of the upper classes, the case would have been a lot more interesting.

Ambiguous genitalia–A social dilemma in Bangladesh: A case report

“…However, another study showed that there has been unsuccessful sexual life of the treated patients [8] . A table of the literature reports on DSD with title, author and journal details is provided in Table 1 [7] , [8] , [9] , [10] , [11] , [12] , [13] , [14] , [15] , [16] , [17] , [18] .…”

Of mermaids and monsters: Transgender history and the boundaries of the human in eighteenth‐ and early‐nineteenth‐century Britain

“…In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, was physically joined by the gods to the water-nymph, Salmacis, who had fallen in love with him. 69 There are many aspects of hybridity in this story but the one that became prevalent was the mixing of masculinity and femininity, physically and sexually. As with debates over the existence of mermaids, debates over 'hermaphrodites' were inherited from classical and post-classical natural science, physiology and myth.…”