Benjamin Franklin Hall 427 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19106
This event is free to attend but registration is required.
Join us for a Lunch at the Library presentation from Beans Velocci who will be discussing their new book: Sex Isn′t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary.
In Sex Isn’t Real, Beans Velocci traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define sex and to create a world devoid of trans life. Drawing on lab notes, family genealogies, medical case studies, and more, Velocci follows scientists and clinicians from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century and across five disciplines—zoology, eugenics, gynecology, statistical sexology, and transsexual medicine—as their ideas and practices created a definitional tangle. They demonstrate how the sorting of bodies into male and female persists not despite but because of sex’s incoherence: the defining features of these categories shift to contain various understandings of anatomy and physiology, theories of race, developments in research and medical methodologies, and bodies that cannot be accounted for in a binary framework. Exposing the endless work required to produce a world in which most people have a binary gender identity that neatly fits their binarily sexed body, Velocci demonstrates that it is not cis people who fit the categories; it’s the categories that flex to make them fit.
This event will take place on Thursday, November 05 2026 at 12:00 p.m. ET in Benjamin Franklin Hall and will also be livestreamed. Please register to attend this event.
Beans Velocci is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science and the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Their research brings together the history of science, STS, trans methods, and the history of sexuality to interrogate the construction of sex as a classification system. Beans's next project is a new book project on Cold War anxiety about repopulation after nuclear war.