LHMP #452 Braunschneider 1999 The Macroclitoride, the Tribade, and the Woman

[Content note: This article and the text it discusses use the word “hermaphrodite” in contexts where it may be applied to people with ambiguous genitalia, as well as applied to people with queer sexuality. My use of the word in discussing the article is not endorsement of these uses and I recognize that this word is considered offensive (as well as inaccurate) by many.]

Rather than being an overall study of the (myth of the) “macro-clitoral” lesbian, this article is focused primarily on the content and context of a specific publication: James Parsons’ 1741 A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry Into the Nature of Hermaphrodites. Parsons pushes back against previous theories that physiological sex and behavioral gender represented a continuum between male and female, with some people representing intermediate forms (labeled “hermaphrodites”).

[Note: for works examining the history of this topic that the LHMP has already covered, I suggest: Nederman & True 1996, Jones & Stallybrass 1991, and Daston & Park 1996.]

Parsons’ thesis is one that could have been written today by anti-queer forces: that there are only two types of physiological sex and that those two are mutually exclusive, that there are only two gendered natures, that they are mutually exclusive, and that they align with physiological sex. But Parsons was not addressing trans identities, rather he was reacting to the idea that a person could have functional male and female genitalia in the same body—the “classical hermaphrodite” as it were—and that physiology drove sexual desire. At a time when the legal system had principles for how to handle people with ambiguous anatomy, Parsons asserted that there was no such thing as ambiguous anatomy, only women with a range of unexpectedly large clitorises who should always be treated legally and socially as female. [Note: In other words, he was not so much erasing trans people, rather he was erasing intersex people.]

The question that Braunschneider addresses is why a mid-18th century physician would feel the need to make this argument. Case histories recorded in the 17th century are rife with accounts of “hermaphroditic bodies” and Parsons goes on a point-by-point refutation of those accounts concluding that those witnesses were simply wrong in how they interpreted the genitalia in question.  Included in this are cases of people believed to have spontaneously changed anatomically from female to male (most likely actually based on observation of certain types of intersex condition). One consequence of Parsons’ views is that he classifies all people who do not have prototypical male physiology as women. (I.e., in essence there are “men” and “not men” with a much larger variation in type for “not men”.)

In this position, Parsons diverged from popular standard texts on anatomy and sexuality of the 17th century, which fell more in the Galenic “one sex” model (i.e., sex is a continuum) and presages the rise of the “two sex” model. [Note: for a deeper exploration of this topic, see Laqueur 1990.] While Parsons’ views were already becoming prevalent in scholarly circles, the force and detail of his arguments suggest that he was aiming at a broader, more general audience, whom he wished to convince.

In contrast to 17th century texts which had a near-prurient fascination with the potential sexual use of a large clitoris (for sex between women), Parsons focuses on countering the social and legal persecution of such people. This comes in parallel with 18th century medical texts drawing back from a focus on the clitoris as a source of female sexual pleasure, with the eventual consequence that medical texts shifted to denying the importance (or even existence) of female sexual pleasure at all. (A shift that contributed to 19th century theories about the “sexually passive woman.”)

This shift in academic discourse around clitoral pleasure was connected with changes in how female same-sex sexuality was viewed and discussed. The 17th century fascination (actually beginning in the 16th century) with the figure of the “tribade” as a woman with an enlarged clitoris who engages in penetrative sex with other women fades away across the 18th century. This motif held that sex between women both caused and was caused by this physiological variation (both views showing up in different contexts, sometimes dependent on the purpose of the author’s arguments). This discourse centered around the concept of “abuse” of the clitoris. That is: it had a “proper” use (female pleasure within m/f sex) but that any other use was “ab-use” that would have dire consequences both for the individual and society. (The article does a fairly extensive survey of the concept of “abuse” in this sense within medical manuals of the 17th century.)

The 17th century texts went beyond viewing this “abuse” as a question of usurping male roles and sexual prerogatives, but raised the possibility that it might result in women becoming men. Within this sexual model, the social roles of man and woman were not challenged, because only the anatomically aberrant tribade was deviant (in “becoming male”) while her partner remained within the social category of “woman.”

These are the connections and consequences that Parsons argued to eliminate. Macro-clitoral women were not men, they were not aberrant, they were not (inherently) tribades because women, by definition, had no “masculine nature” that would drive them to woman-woman sex. Parsons addresses the figure of the tribade twice: when he asserts that those (falsely) accused of being tribades were simply women with large clitorises, and that women with large clitorises were no more likely to desire women than anyone else. Women who engaged in sex together, he asserts, don’t do it from a specific desire, but because they can have sexual satisfaction without risk of pregnancy. Thus, rather than being an identifiable “other,” the tribade ceases to exist – all women have the potential to choose sex with women as a “safe” option. (While this supports his argument for a rigid binary gender system, it could be seen as hearkening back to a libertine view of same-sex desire as being potentially present for everyone, but acted on only depending on circumstances.)