European doctors and scientists viewed Black women’s physiologies as a sign of sexual excess and aberration. The early development of European theories about Black women’s “biological sex” had lasting impact. Numerous scientists and medical doctors used interpretations of “Hottentot” bodies to develop a wide range of theories about sexuality and sexual pathology. One example is that late 19th-century sexologists first articulated lesbianism as a sexually degenerate pathology. Lesbianism was conceived as a defect in achieving the sexual dimorphism proper to white folks. In sexology, gynecology, and evolutionary biology, European lesbians and Black women were said to share the same evolutionary physiology. In other words, white European lesbians had either “devolved” down the evolutionary ladder to be Black or had never achieved the proper phylogenetic state as their proper heterosexual European sisters. Sexologists believed that if one examined a white lesbian’s labia or clitoris, one would find the atavistic traits of the “Hottentot.”
The scientific racism of sexologists also informed the rise of modern-day police forces, which evolved not only from American slave patrols, but from late 19th century French municipal regulations that policed sex and prostitution in an effort to control outbreaks of syphilis. Criminologists theorized that “the prostitute,” like the lesbian, was a predatory personage with a degenerate racial-sexual physiology that matched “Hottentot” bodies. Previous to these municipal regulations, sex work was only an occasional or seasonal act for many agrarian women. However, when French law and medical science declared that the prostitute was a distinct individual that needed to be regulated, agrarian women who periodically visited port cities to engage in sexual commerce were subsequently forbidden from traveling back to their homes and had to remain hostage as “prostitutes”—by order of the police—in order to undergo regular medical checks for syphilitic decay and to work as police informants.
Left untreated, syphilis is a slow-acting bacterial infection where the body, over time, begins to show sores and lesions and where bodily features deteriorate. Syphilis can also have debilitating neurological effects. Thus, for European sexologists, syphilis was not only a cause of physical degeneracy, it was the sign of a deeper inherited degeneracy. As the prostitute with syphilis aged, it was thought that the “mannish,” atavistic traits of her Black/lesbian primitivity were appearing over time. In other words, as the prostitute aged, she became less sexually dimorphic and devolved into a state of folly—a reveal of her true nature. By corollary, syphilis was not the only disease that the prostitute could pass along to her sexual partner: like the lesbian, she could morally corrupt her sexual partner and turn them into a sexual degenerate or invert. Accordingly, the lesbian and the prostitute had to be policed.
As one can see, a wide variety of medical, biological, and social scientists explicitly asserted that the aberrant and dangerous sexual excesses of Black women, lesbians, and prostitutes were physiologically linked. Further, scientists speculated that lesbians and prostitutes had a natural inclination to hide their inferior or abnormal anatomic features in order to hide their deeper criminal natures. Several French physicians asserted that Baartman and other Black women had developed large butts as a failed adaptation in order to hide their “primitive” pelvises and to “mimic” white women’s child-bearing hips in order to attract a mate. Analogously, these same physicians claimed that lesbians and prostitutes “hide” their atavistic traits with makeup and lavish feminine clothing to cover over their “mannishness” for the purpose of luring mates into sexual corruption. Lesbians, prostitutes, and Black women were, by virtue of their “biological sex,” dangerous individuals who hid their true natures so that they could recruit nice white boys and girls into degeneracy. With this history, one can now see how today’s transphobes refashion Victorian racial science and fear of what’s hiding under people clothes for the contemporary age with “bathroom bills” and the aggressive policing of transgender sex workers in order to “protect” women and children.
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