We are delighted to host Juliana Gleeson at Juno Books talking to Sylvia McCheyne about her incredibly apposite new work, Hermaphrodite Logic.
How freedom from binary thinking about sexual difference liberates us all
When a baby is born whose reproductive organs do not fit neatly into a binary idea of biological sex, they are deemed intersex. Often, doctors and parents decide to do surgery soon after birth, and in many cases administer hormones, to make intersex children fit into male/ female categories. Intersex is treated as a medical problem: their physiologies are quickly dismissed as impossible, freakish, or even monstrous.
Hermaphrodite Logic is a history of intersex liberation, exploring both the campaigns and the thinking that began to challenge clinical approaches to sex from the 1990s. Existing between the tidiest attempts to categorise sex, intersex people are typically ‘known over’, and
can be badly mistreated by those trying to make them ‘fit’ more limited views of sex. Their movement has had to challenge those that once spoke over them, and to make sense of their lives using their own terms, and communities.
Hermaphrodite Logic foregrounds the lives and political struggle of intersex people who founded a political movement to end the worst mistreatment.
Juliana Gleeson is a writer, comedian and historian. She has published essays in outlets including Viewpoint Magazine, Invert Journal and VICE, and performed internationally at a wide range of communist and queer cultural events. She is the co-editor of Transgender Marxism.
Sylvia McCheyne is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. Her research explores the everyday experiences of trans women working in the LGBT+ charity sector. Her work has been featured in New Socialist and i-D magazine and has been presented at Historical Materialism and British Sociological Association conferences. She is also an editor of Ebb magazine. Sylvia is currently the host of Common Genders at Juno Books and online, a non-partisan socialist feminist reading group.
“Juliana Gleeson has long operated at the forefront of contemporary sex-liberationist thought and the cutting edge of a Marxism against cisness. Hermaphrodite Logic
is exactly what antifascists need: an eminently usable ensemble of political theory and strategy grounded in historical counter-reality.”
– Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family and Enemy Feminisms
Access information for the shop is available here. Please let us know if you require a wheelchair space/a free ticket for a carer/any other adjustments