Abstract

This essay argues that the reigning medical and scientific understanding of the endocrine system, which insists on its fundamental biological plasticity, was historically constructed through a dual child–animal metaphor. The work accomplished by such organic metaphors, as Donna Haraway terms them, returns us to the endocrine laboratories and clinics in which they were built in Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. The child and animal metaphors implanted the concept of plasticity into the human body to the effect of bringing sexed and gendered life under the jurisdiction of science and medicine, where it could not only be normalized in a sense long appreciated by transgender studies but also cultivated towards the ostensible “improvement” and “perfection” of the human. This is also, then, a history of the eugenic heritage of modern endocrinology, which has been largely ignored in recent discussions of plasticity and the body’s materiality. To interrogate the role of foundational organic metaphors in endocrinology is to open up plasticity not only to its historical context but also to radical contestation, making the contemporary assumptions of transgender medicine untimely, particularly the medicalization of the transgender child.