The Normal Woman: On the Irrelevance of the Body to Sex in Early Twentieth Century Gynecology

Beans Velocci is a historian of sex, science, and classification. They are an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science, core faculty in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's studies, and a faculty affiliate of the Eidos LGBTQ+ Health Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Their first book, Binary Logic: The Power of Incoherence in American Sex Science is under contract with Duke University Press; it argues that "sex" as a classification system and "male" and "female" as categories work precisely because multiple conflicting enactments of them exist simultaneously. Velocci's work has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, The American Naturalist, and Cell, among others, and has received several accolades including the Margaret Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize, the John D'Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award, and the Committee on LGBT History Gregory Sprague Prize.