What can science fiction tell us about sex-change and the transsexual experience?
Though science fiction describes future sociocultural worlds impacted by scientific and technological breakthroughs, a conundrum persists when it comes to science fiction on transgender, transsexual, and sex-change themes. Why is it that fantasies and imaginaries of sex-change in the breakthrough years of hormonal science did not register with authors writing science fiction in this period?
In a recent talk titled, “Sex-Change Science Fiction in the Radium Age, 1900-1935,” at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Distinguished Visitor and Faculty Research Fellow Susan Stryker presented insights from a forthcoming anthology of works on this topic, currently scheduled for publication in 2027 with MIT Press.
A main question for Stryker: “It’s in the early 20th century that surgical and hormonal medical treatments, as well as new legal and administrative procedures, all started coming together to create the contemporary sense of transsexual personhood. 'Sex-change' was happening in real life. You’d think that science fiction would be a popular literary genre for grappling with the implications of these new technological possibilities. And yet, there’s virtually no early science fiction writing that explores this topic. Why?”
To be sure, authors did depict somatic transformations, like in The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells, in which experiments with animals to turn them into humans were portrayed. Or consider the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, penned by Robert Louis Stenvenson. Jekyll concocts a potion to transform his bodily self. The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul by J.D. Bernal also envisions bodily modifications that conjoin biological organisms with machines. “So why is it,” Stryker asks, “given the abundant literary speculation about species change, race change, and about human-machine cyborgs, that there’s no comparable body of work that explores sex change?”
Even when speculative fiction did explore the implications of new hormonal treatments that had become available in the 1910s and '20s, it explored them not in relation to sex change, but in relation to questions of rejuvenation and life extension, as did Bay Area socialite and author Gertrude Atherton in her novel Black Oxen, in which the protagonist undergoes experimental glandular therapy to become young again.
Other authors were preoccupied with the cross-species implications of using xenogenic hormones (human use of hormones derived from non-human animals), as was Bertram Gayton in The Gland Stealers, about a 95-year-old Gran’ pa, who, after receiving a monkey-gland grafting to rejuvenate his libido, funds an expedition to Africa to collect samples to distribute to more aging men. Stryker mentioned how this attention to cross-species hormone therapy and tissue xenotransplantation often devolved into “racist fantasies” that make implicit “species and racial hierarchies” visible. She discussed Nora, la guenon devenue femme (Nora, the Ape Who Became a Woman) by French author Félicien Champsaur, which told the story of Nora, the offspring of a human and an orangutan, who is made to appear more like a human woman through surgical and hormonal manipulation. She becomes a famous entertainer, and the book’s cover art makes clear that the author is fantasizing about Josephine Baker, a Black American star of the Paris stage. Though these stories were closer to what Stryker was seeking, they also revealed how representations of bodily, sex transformation are entangled with histories and fantasies of race.
Stryker examined the transfeminine author Irene Clyde, who lived publicly as Thomas Baty, and published a journal, Urania, that served as a platform for feminist commentary and advocated for abolition of the gender binary. Clyde also authored a “single sexed utopia” book titled Beatrice the Sixteenth. Stryker expressed skepticism regarding the term “utopia,” because slavery was present in that utopia. But interestingly, Stryker noted, in spite of being written by a trans-identified person, there is no technological sex change in Clyde’s novel.
Stryker covered other genres and many authors in fantasy (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum) and horror (The Thing on the Doorstep by H.P. Lovecraft). Sex transformation occurs as themes in these genres but is not technologized.
An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future, by Gregory Casparian, is the book that gets closer to what she is investigating, though it is also colored with racist tones. Across these works, Stryker sought engagement with technological and scientific innovations to imagine worlds of sex-change and a transgender, transsexual experience, but in the end found surprisingly little in the imaginative worlds of science fiction.
“The question remains,” she said, “why technologically accomplished body transformation is imaged across race, species and the human/machine divide, but not sex." Stories about changes of sex primarily appear in horror and fantasy genres rather than science fiction, which Stryker expected to be the primary fiction genre dealing with that topic, especially given the actually existing practice of medico-legal sex change in the early 20th century. She said, "Not finding an easy answer to that question is, in many ways, more interesting than finding any answer at all.”
