Mechanical sex, science, security: Intersex medical violence, Thomas Hobbes and John Money’s invention of gender

Abstract

According to a widespread contemporary medical discourse, intersex people’s well-being is threatened by their own bodily features, which must be ‘corrected’ through emergency surgical measures. Yet intersex people and activists have abundantly documented how these measures enact precisely the suffering that they were framed as countering. This article asks how the presence of such exceptionalist security logic in mundane hospital settings highlights particular intersections of security, bodies and materiality in Western modernity. It puts 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes in dialogue with 20th-century sexologist John Money, and shows how both struggled to construct social order in spite of the disorderly materiality of human bodies. Hobbes ‘invented’ a universal abstracted body, a machine in which matter is subsumed to the fiction of a social will. As science provided mechanistic understandings of sex, race and deviance, the messy materiality of concrete bodies eventually failed to substantiate a biological grounding for the sex binary. Money then ‘invented’ the concept of gender – a social category to which physiological sex is subservient, which feminists later borrowed – to justify violent interventions that physically cut that disorderly materiality out of intersex people’s bodies.