How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea by Sandra Eder

Abstract

Gender is having a moment—still. Sandra Eder’s comprehensive and compassionate history of gender comes as the concept remains deeply embattled. On the one hand, feminist and queer critiques of gender binaries have opened up cultural space for myriad gender variations. Gender-bending, gender-fuck, and the ‘new androgyny’ have mainstreamed the dismantling of rigid identity categories. On the other hand, there is a furious backlash: physical violence and legislative attacks against LGBTQ+, and particularly transgender, communities; censorship of so-called gender theory in classrooms; and cruel harassment by anti-transgender activists of children’s hospitals who perform gender-affirming medical care. The gender wars, waged for decades, are all the more reason that How the Clinic Made Gender is a welcome and powerful contribution to histories of gender. Eder, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, joins other scholars, particularly Joanne Meyerowitz, in telling her ‘uneasy origin story’ of how the ideas of gender and ‘gender role’ emerged and were put into medical practice in the mid-20th century. Focused on the Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Eder historicizes her account within the complicated rise of a therapeutic society and the shifting cultural landscapes of sex, gender, and sexuality.