Unpack This For Me with Beans Velocci

Beans Velocci joins John to discuss their new book Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary (Duke University Press, 2026), looks at how sex emerged as a privileged way of sorting bodies not despite but because of its incoherence. Rather than focus on those whom scientists and medical doctors cast out of male and female categories as pathological aberrations, the book traces how knowledge producers brought ill-fitting bodies back into a normative binary with no harm done to sex itself. It follows a sprawling cast of researchers through zoology, eugenics, gynecology, statistical studies of sex, and transgender medicine as they self-fashioned their expertise, created enmeshed fields of sex science and race science, and made science the way to know sex. Research for this project has been generously funded by the American Philosophical Society, the Kinsey Institute, and the Yale Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies.

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