Nikki

“By the early 1800s, the reverse was true in European thought. Society had previously defined sex; now sex would define society. In the precapitalist one-sex world, one could move, like Marie Garnier, along the continuum of maleness. In the two-sex world, populated by both males and females, sex was fixed and inscribed in medical texts with new words to describe the female anatomy. Today we tend to think about sexual fluidity as something modern, but the reality is that sex has been fixed for only two centuries of the long history of Western civilization, and a number of non-Western societies have, for generations, recognized three, four, or five sexes, and with little or no stigma.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness