Historical sexes

This article considers the origins of scholarly practices of historicizing the sexes, the theoretical problems involved in distinguishing sex from gender across time and place, and some of the major thinkers who have advanced the field of inquiry. It also surveys several important topic areas that have been studied within the field, including the history of genital anatomical description, the history of ideas about sex differences, the history of hermaphrodites and eunuchs, the history of nonbinary, third, or many sexes (both in transcultural historical anthropology and in the history of modern sexology), and the history of recent biological thought about sexed differentiation. For much of human recorded history, sex has been determined by genital observation of infants who are then socialized as boys or girls or categorized as hermaphrodites or a third sex. Sex has also been subject to revision on the basis of genital ambiguity, castration, or comportment and sexual orientation, producing widespread patterns of counting the sexes in multiples greater than two.