In the recently decided Supreme Court cases West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, the Trump Administration took its latest step in leveraging a pseudoscience of “biological sex” to control and harm trans bodies. The Administration began its foray into the pseudoscience of sex on January 20, 2025, with Executive Order 14168, which memorably—and hilariously—stated that sex was “immutable” and defined “at conception”. As many pointed out at the time, all human fetuses are in fact without any clearly defined sex until weeks into a pregnancy, and in the case of intersex fetuses they never develop male or female sexed traits. Moreover, many species do in fact regularly change their sex—with the help of science, humans have also been doing so for over 100 years.
As historian Beans Velocci shows in their recent book Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary (Duke University Press, 2026), the Trump Administration is far from the first to use pseudoscientific ideas about sex to control bodies that it deems inferior. In fact, those in power—most usually white men—have defined sex not based on any meaningful science but instead of shore up regimes of white supremacy and patriarchy. Velocci’s research into the Eugenics Record Office and Station for Experimental Evolution—two prominent engines of “race betterment” in the early 20th century—shows the overlap between their efforts to create a master race and their contributions to the emerging “science” of sex. Among other things, the ERO presented before Congress on how to bar those of inferior genetics from immigrating into the country and even drafted model legislation for forced sterilization that was adopted by 18 states.
Later, Velocci shows how sexual health researcher Alfred Kinsey and the early proponent of gender-affirming care Harry Benjamin both used narrow definitions of sex to the detriment of LGBTQ+ people. The latter was instrumental in promulgating gender-affirming care in the United States during the 1950s and ‘60s, yet, as Velocci shows, Benjamin’s regressive views about how to define sex would center ideas in trans medicine that still haunt the profession to this day.
I spoke with Velocci in a spirited, two-hour-long conversation, covering their research into how the science of sex has long been used to the detriment of marginalized groups, as well as our experiences with gender-affirming healthcare, whether or not gender dysphoria includes cis people, The Matrix, and many other topics. Below is a version of our conversation that has been condensed for length and edited for clarity.
Assigned Media: Just to jump right in, how would you define sex?
Beans Velocci: That’s a good question. I kind of don’t define it in the book, and, very, very much to the point of your question, that’s intentional, right?
If I were to give you the succinct definition that I might use when I’m teaching, I tend to say, “here’s how we’re gonna start to think about sex before we really dig into it. Sex is the appeal to nature that people make when they’re talking about gender. And then, of course, gender is the appeal to the social or the cultural or the psychological when people are talking about sex.”
For me, it’s really a construct, a way of making a particular form of hierarchical order out of bodies that uses an imagined set of traits or processes that are supposed to go together. And we can go through the external anatomy, internal anatomy, chromosomes, hormones, blah, blah, blah, all of that. But it’s really more of the process of insisting that those things go together, and then insisting that that means something.
AM: You’re already cooking so much. I want to get into the whole hierarchical aspect, because I know that’s very important to your book and how all these histories of various forms of bigotry are very entwined. But before we get there I did want to tease this out a little more, this distinction you’re making between an appeal to biology or science, which is seen as “fact,” versus an appeal to culture, which tends not to be. I think that is something that really does implicate the lives of trans people.
BV: I find it really noteworthy that the people who are imagined to be able to say things about sex tend to be scientists and clinicians, but if someone is more in the humanities or the arts, or social science—especially if it’s more qualitative—those are the people who are only allowed to say stuff about gender, whether we’re taking that to mean identity, or as a kind of structure of social power, or whatever.
Those of us who are kind of lumped into that category aren’t really given the authority to say something about sex itself. Like, we can make critiques, or riff on some scientific stuff in terms of what scientists are saying and doing, but no one looks to non-scientists for this. I think this is one of the central problems, and really one of the things that I have been most invested in through this entire project.
AM: I see this so much as a therapist. I have a lot of colleagues, mostly cisgender people, and it’s a weird experience to be regarded by people as though they believe me—or want to believe me—but not necessarily to feel like I have the authority in my own field, when when I am the person who’s have that lived experience, and and they’re not.
BV: Totally. One of the places this project started from was me having these experiences as a trans person in various medical contexts, like having to go through all of these hoops to prove that I knew what I wanted. Not even getting into any kind of academic “What is sex? What is gender?,” just literally being like, “no, I would, in fact, like to have this medical procedure” and not being considered a trustworthy source of that. Instead, some board of people who has never met me that I don’t get to talk to gets to decide.
I had that feeling as I was reading a lot of the history of sex science, just being, like, “oh, all of this was written by cis people who have never had any reason to question the authority of biology.” And I was like, “oh, so, I have to be the one to, like, intervene here,” because I’m the one who looks at this and thinks like “these histories can’t account for the fact that I exist, and that lots of other people exist.” This actually needs a specifically trans approach, you can’t do the history of sex science in a rigorous way without taking trans experience into account.
AM: We’re always treated as, like, this rounding error, like, “oh, well, we can safely ignore that.” As I read your book and delved into all these histories of how to define “sex” I was just struck by how prevalent this way of thinking has been.
BV: I love that phrasing, we’re just a rounding error, because that’s exactly what it feels like. I talk about this in the [Alfred] Kinsey chapter, looking into the development of statistical methods of sex science and the kind of attention to what is “common” as being what’s actually important to study. But then it’s like, “ok, common compared to what?”
I have this deep-seated rage about the political move to say, “well, trans people are only pointwhatever percent of the population, why does anyone care?” It feels like such a ceding of power when I see people do that. I don’t think making ourselves smaller is the right way. I’m much more inclined to argue that actually most people don’t fit the so-called natural categories, it’s a lot of labor that goes into forming them. I think that’s a much stronger place to start from. The very fact that we’re being portrayed as this minority group is itself a real shoring up of cissness and all of these things that are not in our interest.
AM: I think this is an important point, because even as trans people, we tend to get brainwashed by this stuff, to the point where we also internalize these narrow ideas about men and women. And in my opinion part of the healing journey we’re on is to let go of all that.
BV: Definitely. All kinds of people have to contort themselves to fit into these narrow categories. Cis people experience dysphoria all the time, and we have all of these industries built around making cis people feel more like women or more like men. So the experience of looking at your body and thinking that what you’re seeing makes you feel like you’re not in the category that you’re supposed to be in is not limited to trans people. And that’s one of the products of binary sex and binary gender being the result of a lot of work to put people back into those categories. A lot of cis people don’t actually match these categories.
AM: I think this conversation can have the potential to really piss people off, but it’s important to have. In the book you question if the distinction between cis and trans is even that useful, and a lot of your project is questioning if categories in general are that useful. And I do think it’s a fair question. I don’t really experience my transness on a day to day basis any more, it just doesn’t factor into my daily life that much, and it does occur to me that the people who are trying to make it something that I can never, ever forget about are the same people saying immigrants are evil and that you need like 27 generations of WASPy heritage to ever be considered an actual American.
BV: I think that it is really not coincidental that those two things go together. Regarding the question of if the cis/trans is even useful, I guess one of the things it’s important to mention here is that some of the pushback against “cis people also have dysphoria,” or “dysphoria isn’t the one and only marker of transness” is that people say you don’t think that people medically transition. And my response is that, no, I want everyone to have any and all medical care that they need. I think that’s true of everyone, right? Whether we’re putting people in a cis or trans category, everyone should have access to the tools and technologies that enable them to create the body that they want to live in. I’m someone who has experienced a lot of dysphoria and who has done a lot of medical stuff. Lots of trans people still have dysphoria even after going through whatever kinds of medical things that they’re choosing to do.
AM: Yeah, that’s really important. I mean I’ve had so much dysphoria in my life, it was incredibly traumatizing, and we definitely can’t lose sight of how debilitating dysphoria is. Now that we’re getting into medical care, I want to bring in your chapter about Harry Benjamin, who’s like such a problematic figure. Of course he’s kind of the godfather of gender-affirming care in this country, and what he started would eventually become WPATH, so we do need to say that there’s been so much access for trans people that’s ultimately come out of what he’s done. But also like, wow, did this guy ever suck, and especially reading a lot of the things that you uncovered, it’s just like, oh, man, fuck this guy.
BV: I will preface this by saying that while Harry Benjamin was restricting access for care to trans people he was also taking testosterone. And it’s crazy. because even right now I get advertisements for Hims all the time, the algorithm decided I’m dealing with low testosterone. So it’s totally fine for cis dudes to go get some testosterone—
AM:—or even cis women, as long as they’re trying to jump their libido in menopause.
BV: Right, exactly! And this is another one of those intersections where it’s like, which form of oppression does a given system care more about? But anyway, so I went into Harry Benjamin’s papers at the Kinsey Institute, and there were actually some trans men, but the people he and his associates were most interested in were trans women, mostly white, middle to upper class trans women.
I expected to find a lot of discourse about if such and such a person was really a woman or not, but what I actually found was that their concerns were, “Will this person cause legal or other professional trouble for her doctor later on?,” and “Will she pass?” These were these incredibly selfish functionally and aesthetically oriented concerns that had nothing to do with policing of sex or gender boundaries. They were not so worried about the category of womanhood, they were much more interested in “Am I gonna get sued?,” “Is this patient gonna become violent?” “Is this patient going to regret transitioning?” The regret thing was central, and this is where we get the current panic about trans regret. It’s rooted in this mid-20th-century concern that trans people don’t know our own wants. Benjamin and his colleagues were constructing transness as a state of fundamentally mentally unstable.
AM: I was really struck by how much they were couching these things in terms of their fear of regret, since I often see that even many affirming mental health professionals often still find that thinking creeping into their discourse. The whole notion of regret just seems to just be so implicit in trans healthcare.
BV: I think it was baked into trans healthcare from the beginning, at least like in the 1950s, Harry Benjamin beginning. It’s even in the first 1979 draft of the then [Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association], now WPATH Standards of Care, where they’re explicitly like, clinicians need to be extra careful about patient selection. They use the language of “undergoing something irreversible,” all of that language that we’re so used to now.
And so therefore we need this therapist letter, right, so that it can absolve the clinician of responsibility. But in the present, it’s just so wild to me that there are so many things that people regret doing. Lots of forms of surgery, like knee replacements, have a much higher regret rate than any kind of transition care. And yet, you don’t need a therapist letter to get a knee replacement. It really speaks to the construction of the trans person and medical transition as likely to induce regret because there’s this idea that the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone would be if their body didn’t fit a normative male or female category. Or that, if they thought that their body didn’t, then they must have some “delusion.” That’s supposed to be the worst possible thing, when it’s like, actually, maybe that’s not that big of a deal.
AM: Stef Shuster wrote a great book called Trans Medicine, which talks about how when trans healthcare was coming together in the ‘50s and ‘60s, various authorities were playing this game of hot potato like, “Okay, who’s gonna hold the responsibility for letting this person do this thing?” And no one ever just stops to think, well, maybe if this person’s surgery doesn’t work out as they intended, they’ll just manage that themselves, and they’ll be responsible about it. It just gets to just how this whole world patronizes us and infantilizes us, and can’t seem to conceive of the fact that we could have a desire that’s a valid, legible, mature, adult desire.
There’s also the fact that most trans people have experienced so much trauma, so often when we do present to doctors or psychologists or whoever, we don’t look like we’re in the best shape, and understandably, because we’ve been through some shit. These people in positions of power don’t stop and think, like, “wow, this person’s had a hard life, that’s why they’re presenting like this.” They just think, “wow, this person is potentially a danger to me.”
BV: Yeah, exactly, and that’s 100 percent true of the stuff in Harry Benjamin’s papers. These individuals are so early in the moment where the category of transness was even circulating, that they might have just recently even found out that transition was something that was possible, and so had been living their entire life as solidly adults. They were adult trans women living in the 1950s, so of course trying to live like that isn’t exactly going to be good for their well-being. And then Harry Benjamin is doing wild shit, and so is Elmer Belt, who’s the urologist that he’s working with, basically just like stringing people along.
AM: That part really got to me when I read that. They’re, like,” yeah, we’re never gonna give them the surgery, but we’re not gonna tell them that because that would be too hard on them.” Like, did you not think that it would be too hard for someone to have their hopes go on for years and years and years of their life, and never actually fulfill them?
BV: And then they’re, like, “Why is this person crying?”
AM: Yeah, exactly. I do want to keep talking about Harry Benjamin, because there’s so much to say, and God did that guy suck, even if he did do a lot for us, but I also did want to talk about what you have to say about racism. I was really struck by the information you brought to light through your research in terms of how much overlap there was between white supremacists and transphobes, and how it was all part of this kind of eugenicist project of trying to build the master race of white people.
BV: That was one of the other things that was really striking to me, the way that historians of sex science had mostly seen these things as separate. It was really remarkable to me, when I was looking at stuff like the Eugenics Record Office and Station for Experimental Evolution to be, like, “oh, no, these are the same guys.” They are sometimes emphasizing one thing over another, but the funding for the eugenics stuff is coming from the sex science committee. And the sex research is being done by the eugenesists, it’s all one tangle.
For me, that speaks to the way that even in the present we talk about sex and race often as these very distinct categories, like axes of power, to borrow a term from Patricia Hill Collins, but, as with the split between sex and gender, the split between sex and race is a product of history. And so in a lot of the periods that I’m talking about, there’s an assumption that racial difference manifests in sexual difference, and vice versa.
AM: There’s a lot going on here. Like, this critique of Black womanhood, where they say things like, “your features are not the correct features, so you can’t be a woman the way a white European woman can be.” There’s that, and then there’s this other stuff that you quote from their work. This stuff is really amazing, people should see this. Things like people theorizing that maybe Black women are this third sex, kind of like there are worker bees, they’re just born to be enslaved. People actually theorize these things, it’s just incredible to read that.
BV: Yeah, yeah, it really was. That’s one of the weird things about doing this project in general. In some ways, the research is really easy because people just said the quiet part out loud, like this question of the construction of Black womanhood as kind of outside of binary sex.
AM: Let me also bring up this other piece of this history, which it always blows my mind that more people don’t know about. This should be more in the discourse around trans people. It’s something that you talk about in the book, the fact that a lot of our gynecological knowledge and a lot of our knowledge of how to create female genitalia for the purpose of gender-affirming care comes from this non-consensual experimentation on enslaved Black women.
BV: There is like a lot of really excellent scholarship on this, it’s been a theme in Black women’s history for quite some time, and in the history of gynecology and even obstetrics as well. The whole world of American medical experimentation is so deeply grounded in experimentation on Black people’s bodies. I think the question of where do the technologies of medical transition come from is a really fraught question. There are so many elements that we now take for granted as just what medical transition is—there’s what you’re talking about, the gynecological experimentation, then there’s the way that the use of hormones came out of experiments at the Station for Experimental Evolution that were in the service of eugenics, experiments with gonad transplantation on incarcerated people. All of these really, really violent histories. Throughout the history of science and medicine, all of these various technologies that people need in the present are rooted in these incredibly violent histories. There’s no easy answer.
AM: No, there really isn’t, but I do think talking more about it is at least moving us in the right direction. As you argue quite eloquently in the book, sex is very much a made-up category, and it’s changed so much over the years and it’s just very incoherent. Its definition at any one point has much more to do with whose interests are really being served more than any “biological reality.” But the fact remains, it’s here, we’re stuck with it, at least for now. In so far as it is a thing that’s out there in the world, and we do demonstrate the capacity to change our sex as it’s generally defined, so we subvert that whole framework. Why do you think that threatens people so much?
BV: I think part of it is what I was saying about hierarchy before. There is so much investment in sex as a system that undergirds all kinds of hierarchies. It’s so foundational to so many other forms of hierarchized difference that I think it’s really threatening when that is destabilized.
I think there’s also such a strong investment among cis people in doing sex and gender right. That takes so much energy so much time, so much money, there’s just this deep, deep investment in cis-ness on an individual level that for someone to then be like, “hey, actually, I opted out of that, you don’t have to do that,” I think that’s probably really destabilizing.
I think that’s part of the reason that it’s so scary. It invites the questioning of so many things. Once you’re able to do that, it kind of disrupts a set of assumptions. And then it does become a lot easier, and and maybe even necessary, to start thinking, “well, okay, if this thing that I thought was like, fundamentally true, actually isn’t right, then, like, what else do I think is fundamentally true and right?”
VE: Yeah, which, I actually think of as a really nice thing. Like, that’s one of the things I love about being trans, that my position in the world has forced me to make that inquiry, which has just felt so amazing and has allowed me to do so many things with my life that probably would have been impossible to me if I wasn’t trans.
BV: I think a lot of people think, “I’d rather not do that. Like, I’m happy, the way it is. Yeah, I’m better off not knowing.”
AM: I mean, that’s like going right back to The Matrix, you know?
BV: Yeah, no, I was thinking of The Matrix as I was formulating that statement.
AM: Yeah, which is weird, because so many people love that scene in The Matrix, with the red pill and the blue pill. Everyone’s like, “yeah, pick the red pill!” That really, really resonates with people. But then it’s kind of like, “but would you really pick the red pill, is that what you really want?”
BV: Right, and I think like on the political right, it’s, like, “okay, we’ve started questioning sex, so what’s next, capitalism? And then what, God?” A lot of the right’s power depends on, I think, a lack of curiosity and a lack of analysis. Because if you start poking at one thing, you know, pulling on one thread, pulling on another thread, the whole thing kind of starts to unravel, right?
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.
