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

In Sex Isn't Real, Beans Velocci traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define sex and to create a world devoid of trans life. Drawing on lab notes, family genealogies, medical case studies, and more, Velocci follows scientists and clinicians from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century and across five disciplines-zoology, eugenics, gynecology, statistical sexology, and transsexual medicine-as their ideas and practices created a definitional tangle. They demonstrate how the sorting of bodies into male and female persists not despite but because of sex's incoherence: the defining features of these categories shift to contain various understandings of anatomy and physiology, theories of race, developments in research and medical methodologies, and bodies that cannot be accounted for in a binary framework. Exposing the endless work required to produce a world in which most people have a binary gender identity that neatly fits their binarily sexed body, Velocci demonstrates that it is not cis people who fit the categories; it's the categories that flex to make them fit.

Author: Beans Velocci
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 02/03/2026
Pages: 326
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.73d
ISBN13: 9781478033028
ISBN10: 1478033029
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | LGBTQ+ Studies | Transgender Studies
- History | LGBTQ+
- Science | History

About the Author
Beans Velocci is Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.