#inversionsteori

[forislynx]

The legacy of the idea of inversion meant that homosexuality and trans identity remained entangled for many years: sometimes it provided an excuse to deny trans people medical care on the basis that they were ‘really just gay’, other times it threw up barriers in the way of trans people whose transition wouldn’t ‘make them straight’ in the eyes of society. But ultimately, it equipped scientists, medics and politicians with the conceptual tools they needed to recognise that some people identified as […] a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, and this could be seen as legitimate medical need rather than a moral failing. The history of inversion, then, is trans history as well as gay history – both because it framed sexuality as a form of gender identity, and because it was in some ways the precursor to the political rights and medical care that some trans people now have access to.

Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans : A New History of Gender

[forislynx]

The model of queer attraction that Ulrichs first articulated became known as "inversion". What had been inverted, in the eyes of the sexologists and their contemporaries, was the natural direction of sexual desire […]. Desire for men, in the eyes of Ulrichs and many of those around them, was an intrinsically female thing. You couldn’t be 100 per cent male and attracted to men: that just didn’t compute, and so an AMAB person who was attracted to men became, in some essential way, female. The understanding of sexual and romantic attraction as an intrinsic part of gender […] was a longstanding ideology, but was particularly bolstered in nineteenth-century Europe by the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. Particularly in middle-class households, this naturalised the division between strong, independent men who worked outside the home and passive, nurturing women who worked inside the home to raise children – fostering a sense that these gender stereotypes, their complementarity, and their mutual attraction were the natural order of things.

Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans : A New History of Gender

[forislynx]

Krafft-Ebing set out four ‘degrees’ of inversion, each of which caused people to experience their gender in a different way. In the first degree, the invert had a "predominating homo-sexual instinct" but with traces of "heterosexual": people of this degree had "sexual feeling" for "persons of the same sex", but their gendered behavior didn’t change […], meaning their inversion was "curable" […]. In the second degree, the invert had "inclination only toward the same sex", leading them to undergo "a deep change of character": for the AMAB invert, "his feelings and inclination . . . become those of a female" […]. In the third degree, "The entire mental existence is altered to correspond with the abnormal sexual instinct", and experience Krafft-Ebing called "effemination" for AMAB people and "viraginity" for AFAB people […]. In the fourth degree, aspects of the physical body (though not the genitals) appeared at odds with the gender the invert was assigned at birth, and they experienced what we would now call body dysmorphia, "the delusion of a transformation of sex": one case study "felt . . . that [their] genitals were changed into those of a female", and "felt the growth of [their] breasts".

Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans : A New History of Gender