Nelly Oodshoorn's Beyond The Natural Body

Sex, or the categorization of human bodies into male and female, can seem inevitable and logical. However, due to scientific advancements and changing social understanding, the definition of sex has evolved over time. Many historians focus on how social constructions affect medical interpretation of what constitutes a person’s sex, or they choose to look at the effect scientific advancements have on how people are able to conceptualize sex. By concentrating on one factor or the other, it is easier to look at the causal relationship between science and the public when thinking about sex. However, this can be limiting when evaluating how sex is truly understood based on the historical moment. Both social influences and scientific possibilities

Prior to the discovery of hormones, sex was determined based on one’s gonads. If a person had testicles, they would likely be categorized as male, ovaries would lead to a female assignation. The discovery of hormones revealed that the changes brought about by these sexual organs were due to chemicals produced in the gonads. The creation of a field of endocrinology drastically changed how sex was understood both by doctors and by the public. Historians exploring this period of hormonal discovery argue that research was affected by social assumptions surrounding sex, and that social understandings of sex were affected by new discoveries in the field of endocrinology.

Nelly Oodshoorn’s book Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones explores the social factors affecting hormonal research in the early twentieth century. She argues that preexisting notions of gender significantly affected how scientists understood sex hormones through trials. Her chapter “The birth of sex hormones” centers around early research into hormones that created the field of sex endocrinology. When scientists discovered that chemicals secreted in the gonads affected the development of sexual dimorphism in animals and humans, Oodshoorn argues that they