Sex Isn’t Real

Beans Velocci's 'Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary' traces how scientists and clinicians from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century across disciplines—zoology, eugenics, gynecology, statistical sexology, and transsexual medicine—created a tangled set of definitions of sex.

Velocci shows how these shifting definitions were deployed to sort bodies, support racial hierarchies, and professionalize scientific authority, and how the tension between malleable and binary models of sex generated both scientific knowledge and social harm.

The book uses archival sources—lab notes, genealogies, case studies—to reveal how categories flexed to make most people appear to fit a binary while marginalizing others.

Ultimately, Velocci argues that persistence of the sex binary depends on this incoherence and sustained administrative and medical labor to shore it up.

The work intervenes in contemporary debates by demonstrating that sex is culturally produced with scientific authority rather than a fixed biological fact.