Prior to the modern understanding of sex as fundamentally biological, a person’s sex status—that is, whether they were male or female—was largely a legal issue. How was this legal fact established in cases of doubt? To answer that question, this article tells the story of the regulation of cases of doubtful sex (the cases of people who were then referred to as hermaphrodites) between 1629 and 1787 in England and Colonial America. Trials of doubtful sex from this period show that, rather than being based on a single piece of evidence (such as genital appearance), determining a person’s sex required a rich and context-sensitive evaluation by witnesses and juries. However, toward the end of the eighteenth century, scientific and medical authorities gradually sought to classify hermaphrodites according to their “true sex” and to remove any doubt from that classification. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that the early modern common law tradition did not conceptualize sex as purely binary and did not hinge on medical opinions throughout most of the eighteenth century. These findings highlight the continuous engagement of courts in actively shaping the meaning and ontology of sex rather than merely reflecting it in their decisions.

在现代将性理解为从根本上说是生物学之前，一个人的性别状态——即他们是男性还是女性——在很大程度上是一个法律问题。在有疑问的情况下如何确定这一法律事实？为了回答这个问题，本文讲述了 1629 年至 1787 年间英格兰和殖民地美洲对可疑性别案件（当时被称为雌雄同体的人的案件）进行监管的故事。这一时期对可疑性别的试验表明，确定一个人的性别需要证人和陪审团进行丰富且对上下文敏感的评估，而不是基于单一证据（例如生殖器外观）。然而，到了十八世纪末，科学和医学当局逐渐寻求根据“真实性别”对雌雄同体进行分类，并消除对该分类的任何疑问。最终，这篇文章表明，早期现代普通法传统并未将性概念化为纯粹的二元性，并且在 18 世纪的大部分时间里并不依赖于医学观点。这些发现强调了法院在积极塑造性的意义和本体方面的持续参与，而不仅仅是在他们的决定中反映它。