This is a companion piece to the author’s article Virginia Prince, Robert Stoller and the Trans Feminist Intellectual History of the Sex/Gender Distinction, recently published in History Workshop Journal 99.
On the 16th April 2025, the UK Supreme Court delivered their judgement that the definitions “woman” and “sex” should be interpreted as “biological woman” and “biological sex” in the 2010 Equality Act. The myriad pernicious implications of this ruling have been promptly and forcefully highlighted. These include the erasure of trans lesbians, the exclusion of trans people from single sex spaces, and the outright ideological objection to the existence of trans people, particularly trans women, that the ruling rests on and normalises.
However, one of the most significant outcomes of the ruling is not an interpretation of the Equality Act that overturned precious protections for trans people. By most metrics, the Equality Act 2010 had never been a trans affirmative piece of legislation given that ‘gender reassignment’ (not gender identity) is the only characteristic by which trans and non-binary people can claim protection, and that sex is understood as binary. Even if someone has a gender recognition certificate (GRC) they will be treated as the ‘sex; indicated on their original birth certificate for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. What is most concerning about the ruling, then, is the rampant climate of transmisogyny it has given rise to, and the judicially enforced rhetorical advancement of a “common-sense” notion that regardless of one’s “certificated sex” (the only alternative understanding of sex that the courts considered to biological sex), sex cannot in fact change.
Turning to the history of the sex/gender distinction, we can learn a lot about the ideological dimensions to present day (and past) investments in binary sex as a “common sense” immutable fact. Indeed, whilst historians have typically proposed that the sex/gender distinction was a clinical invention, usually attributed to the psychologist Robert Stoller, my archival research highlights that Stoller was significantly influenced by his colleague, friend, and collaborator Dr Virginia Prince. Yet highlighting the deeply trans misogynistic hierarchies of knowledge production that pervade academia, and which facilitate the theft and discrediting of women’s, especially trans women’s ideas, Stoller never publicly credits her.
Dr Virginia Prince was a University of California San Francisco (UCSF) trained pharmacologist. After completing her PhD in 1939, she took up a role as a research assistant at UCSF in 1941. In addition to working as a cancer specialist, this position meant that Prince, who was looking to understand more about her own gender identity at the time, had access to all the available medical and clinical literature on sexual diversity. She soon became one of the field’s most well-read authorities and in 1957 she published her first academic article on sex, gender and sexuality in the American Journal of Psychotherapy. Titled ‘Homosexuality, Transvestism and Transsexuality: Reflections on Their Etiology and Differentiation’, it contained the foundations of what Prince would consistently argue: that most transvestites were generally not homosexual, that sex, gender and sexuality are distinct, and that medical researchers and the general public had failed to realize this.
Stoller became interested in Prince five years after this publication, when Prince was giving lectures to both medical students and the general public on transvestism and the difference between sex and gender. The two became close friends, intellectual sparring partners, and Stoller interviewed Prince twice a month for twenty-nine years, until his death in 1991. When in 1968, Stoller published his landmark first edition of Sex and Gender, he had been in close exchange with Prince for five years. Exploring the development of Prince’s own thinking, through letters and unpublished articles in her archives, alongside her published arguments, highlights that it was Prince who first insisted that the term sex should be biologically defined, while the term gender should refer to attributes of masculinity and femininity. As she recalls, she “brainwashed” Stoller into following her own arguments (which also got taken up to a lesser degree by trans medical practitioner Harry Benjamin and found their way into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980).
So why was Prince, who herself was a transvestite and in favour of liberating gender expression, so attached to preserving biological sex as an immutable, biological fact? A clue comes in her oral history with Dallas Denny, as Prince recalls the somewhat unusual beginnings of her sex/gender lecturing career. Prince had been prosecuted for sending an erotic exchange in the mail to a fellow trans femme, and reluctantly pleaded guilty for this “homosexual” offence. Faced with a five-year parole settlement, a devastating condition of which was that she would be unable to wear her normal women’s clothes, her attorney had the idea that she would be able to continue to dress “en-femme” if she gave lectures educating the public about cross-dressing. Prince gladly took up this idea, and the first date, at her attorney’s Kiwanis Club, was set for just a few weeks’ time- March 1961. Prince recounts that as she was preparing for this, she had to figure out how to explain her “cross-dressing” to a “normal” (i.e. male, straight, cis, middle-class) audience:
How do I appear before forty ordinary businessmen, the kind of people that join service clubs, dressed as a woman, and try to explain to them what the hell’s going on? I mean, they’re going to have a built-in idea this is a queer queen if there ever was one. And I couldn’t figure out how to approach the subject, what to tell them.
And then I thought of John Money’s book – not book, but article – with the Hampsons. The subject was pseudohermaphrodites, in which John first published the statement about being caught up in the gender appropriate to the sex of assignment. Which is a very important assignment.
Prince’s lectures developed John Money’s 1955 concept of a “gender role” and applied it to her own life as a self-identified heterosexual transvestite occupying two distinct gender identities: Virginia and Charles. (It wasn’t until 1968 that Prince would live full time as Virginia). Bifurcating sex from gender to the general public for the first time, enabled Prince to distinguish and differentiate herself from those “sex” deviants (transsexuals and homosexuals) and to present her own gender expression as continuous with normative, respectable, white America. Initially not having had the finances to pursue surgery herself, she made a life’s mission of intellectually and morally justifying her decision never to do so, and of advising other trans people to follow her lead: to live, in her words, as “genderally” oneself (some or all of the time), whilst remaining sexually “normal”.
These arguments, then taken up by Stoller and then second wave feminists, seem to be a concession to what Prince felt was achievable at the time, and an accommodation of the presumed homophobia and transphobia of her audiences. Such concessions were not unwarranted; this was the time of the Lavender Scare (a government-led moral panic about homosexuality) and as historian Joanne Meyerowitz has highlighted, the multiplicity of sex/gender subgroups in the 1960s led many to pursue respectability and adopt strategies to appear “normal”, including denigrating others- particularly those without race and class privileges.
As a trained pharmacologist, Prince was aware of the non-binary character of sex. In a 1962 article discussing sex hormones, which she self-administered, Prince makes the more visionary comment that, “it is obvious that “male” and “female” are becoming statistical terms only”, even going as far as to note that:
The law and the legal profession will one day be faced with having to decide the sex of the person or at least the sex he wishes to present to society on the basis of the person’s own personal preference simply for lack of clear-cut distinctions. When sex and gender with it can be influenced and determined by the interaction of anatomy, chromosomes, hormones and the psychosocial forces of upbringing, all kinds of combinations are possible, and the rules cannot be imposed just on the basis of what the majority are like. That will be the day, as the man said, for FPs [meaning Femmiphile-Prince’s preferred term for transvestite].
Prince was prescient to observe that the complexity of sex would make it a judicial battlefield. However, in light of 2025’s escalation of judicially backed assaults on trans self-determination, she was naively optimistic to predict the courts would be the safeguards of sex self-ID. Moreover, these understandings were not the ones that she presented at scientific conferences, in exchanges with leading sexologists, to audiences of service men and policemen, and to the wives of heterosexual crossdressers who sought her advice about their marriages and domestic lives. Where Prince exercised a lasting influence was in her appeal to a colonial and conservative logic of nature/culture which naturalized sex and sexuality, whilst presenting “gender” (including her own) as social and therefore amenable to change.
Our present moment’s thinly veiled transmisogynistic arguments make use of the same common-sense framing of sex/gender, nature/culture to argue that whilst gender is social (either a threatening ideology or a valid identity), one can’t change one’s sex. As we live in the unknown aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling, it falls on those seeking to promote trans inclusive spaces and communities to refute any clear distinctions between nature and culture, biology and sociology, and to affirm the self-authorised identifications of all.