Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

While the necessity of normalizing surgery on intersexed individuals is a topic of ongoing debate in the 21st century, the origins of surgery as a therapeutic practice for ambiguous or unusual genitalia lie in the 19th century.The first report of corrective surgery published in the United States appeared in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1852, but surgery did not immediately replace more traditional social prescriptions designed to fit hermaphrodites into a dimorphic model of human sex. Only after homosexuality became a matter of discussion in American medical journals did the frequency of normalizing surgeries increase. This paper explores the connection between physicians' increased interest in preventing "abnormal" sexual behavior and their insistence that interventionist surgeries were the most appropriate means of treating cases of hermaphroditism.