Historic Classification of Sexual Ambiguity

Monday, September 28, 2026 - 12:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project If people today -- with the availability of modern medical understandings of sexual development and variation -- can have such difficulty fitting intersex people into their understanding of the world, just imagine how much more confused pre-modern people may have been. Though pre-modern people had the advantage of allowing for types of causation that had no actual biological basis. This chapter of DeVun reviews several of the stages of theorizing about non-binary bodies and how to deal with them that prevailed in the medieval era. Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #581e DeVun 2020 The Shape of Sex Chapter 4 About LHMP Full citation: DeVun, Leah. 2020. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-2311-9551-5 Chapter 4: Sex and Order in Natural Philosophy and Law Philosophy When writing about actual intersex people (as opposed to mythic images)…