Un « sexe indéterminé » ? : l’identité civile des hermaphrodites entre droit et médecine au XIXe siècle

Abstract

Because it upsets the strict structure of biologic sexes and social roles by breaking the borders between male and feminine, between normal and abnormal, between reality and appearance, the hermaphrodite status imposes itself upon the 19th century, and quite particularly during the Belle Epoque, as a crucial stake. The doctors discover, with a mixture of fascination and aversion, people living as women when they are, for them, biologically men-the opposite being much rarer-and denounce these "errors of sex" existing mostly since the determination of the sex at birth. They envisage introducing a third sex into the civil status but they will fail to impose a biologic logic to jurists and legislators who, for the greater part, remain attached to the rule of the binary division of sexes.