Risky Cities: The Physical and Fiscal Nature of Disaster Capitalism

in Switzerland thought intersex individuals should have a say in which sex they were assigned. They disputed Money’s assertion that by the age of 2 sex assignment and socialization needed to occur. Moreover, Eder traces the development of knowledge in textbooks between the 1950s and 1970s to document how widely the Hopkins research circulated. In these textbooks, we begin to see fractures in the scientific community as some researchers in the 1960s returned to biological explanations for sex assignment determinations. By the 1960s, Money’s recommendations for the treatment of intersex individuals were widely embraced, and gender ‘‘took on a life of its own’’ (p. 195) for a wide variety of stakeholders including feminists, social scientists, and in transgender medical care. Chapter Seven traces these various epistemic communities and how they put gender to use. Readers are introduced to Robert Stoller, who worked in the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Gender Identity Research Clinic in 1962 and developed the term ‘‘gender identity’’ as distinct from gender role. While Stoller’s team was cautious about using surgical interventions, Hopkins centralized surgical interventions as a primary tool in the medical management of intersex individuals. Meanwhile, by the late 1960s and 1970s, Money’s ideas about the malleability of gender roles was taken up by feminists who advocated that if gender was learned, it could also be dismantled. Messy and complex, How the Clinic Made Gender offers a genealogy of sex categorization and the contradictions between prevailing theories and treatment protocols for working with intersex individuals. As Eder demonstrates, it was neither biological determinism nor cultural reductionism that enabled the team at Johns Hopkins to develop the idea of gender, but a feedback loop between the two. Moreover, Eder’s work shows how since its early formulation by Wilkins and appearance in the writings of John Money and the Hampsons, ‘‘gender’’ has never been a straightforward concept. Nor, as Eder shows, is gender neutral or value-free. Instead, How the Clinic Made Gender offers a poignant reminder that scientists and medical professionals are shaped by social and cultural norms and the contexts within which they work and the relationships they have established.