Disciplining Diagnoses: Sexology, Eugenics, and Trans* Subjectivities

Abstract

While some believe that eugenics ended after World War II, eugenics heavily influenced the development and evolution of diagnoses of gender variance. Where eugenicists applied the terms “degenerate” and “unfit” to those deemed undesirable in the early twentieth century, so too did sexologists, many of whom were also eugenicists, when describing and constructing the diagnostic category of transvestite. I trace the evolution of trans-diagnostic categories and argue that eugenics significantly influenced how both sexologists and transpeople understood transvestism in the 20th century, particularly in relation to race, sexuality, and disability. Reflecting the common eugenic strategies of the first several decades of the 1900s, many sexologists commented on degeneracy, heredity, and disability within texts focused on transvestism. Their eugenic leanings were also evidenced by anxieties concerning transvestites marrying and reproducing, two actions that eugenicists sought to control. The wide influence of eugenic ideology in sexological writings made the separation of eugenics and transvestism irreversible. Reading texts about and by transvestites and transsexuals while recognizing the discursive and historical context in which they wrote, I point out the ways in which understandings of gender and eugenics were mutually productive in these writings. While current descriptions of transsexuals do not include terms like “degeneracy,” its vestigial meanings remain. The present-day search for causes and “cures” for transsexualism are rooted in this history of eugenics. Recognizing and acknowledging this history is crucial for understanding what is at stake for inhabiting these diagnoses, and for how trans* communities will negotiate them moving forward.