Sex Research at the Borders of Gender: Transvestites, Transsexuals, and Alfred C. Kinsey

Abstract

Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey's vision of sexual taxonomy continued to evolve after he published his first landmark volume on human sexuality, and his research into sexual subcultures went beyond his initial studies of homosexuality and prostitution. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he developed a new interest in cross-dressing and cross-gender identification. This article outlines how and why he began to interview transvestites and transsexuals, and places his emerging vision of gendered behavior and gender identity within the scientific theories of his day. Kinsey rejected the prevailing views, preferring instead a behaviorist model of gender. He saw cross-dressing and crossgender identification as male phenomena and used them to speculate about sex differences in the capacity for psychological conditioning. In his usual style, he did not condemn transvestites or transsexuals, but he disapproved of the genital surgery requested by male-to-female transsexuals. It was here that Kinsey hit the limits of his well-known sexual liberalism in which he approved of all sexual variations that did not involve coercion.

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