There Was One Sex for Two Thousand Years
A Writer's Guide to Sex, Gender, and Bodies Before the Modern Binary
If you read and enjoyed The Homosexual Was Invented in 1869, this is its companion piece. Same approach to historical accuracy. Same craft implications. Different subject.
Virtue
The Latin word for courage is virtus.
It comes from vir—man. Not male, not a chromosome count, not a genital configuration. Man—the quality of being one. Courage, self-mastery, command, the capacity to act decisively under pressure. These weren’t masculine traits in the way we mean it—attributes correlated with maleness by cultural habit. They were masculine substance. Evidence. The Romans held that if you demonstrated virtus, you were demonstrating male nature. Your behavior was testimony about what you were.
We get the word virtue from this. Two thousand years of linguistic inheritance, and we’ve managed to strip the sex out of it entirely. The Romans would have found that bizarre. For them, there was no gap between character and biology. A body that produced courage was a male body expressing itself correctly. A body that virilized—that grew hair, deepened its voice, broadened its shoulders—was a body doing what virtus had already announced it would.
If that sounds alien to you, good. It should.
You're modern. You've inherited a framework that claims sex is determined by science—by chromosomes, by gonads, by rigorous biological assessment. In practice, it's determined by a nurse glancing at a newborn for half a second and checking a box. That box follows you for the rest of your life. Everything else—your skeleton, your voice, your temperament, the fire in you or the absence of it—is cosmetic. Personality. Irrelevant to the question of what you are. The Romans weighed all of it. We don't even look.
The ancients had a different framework. And it wasn’t primitive. It was holistic.
What follows is about how the ancient and classical world understood sex—not just atypical bodies, but all bodies. What made a man a man. What made a woman a woman. How a civilization decided, and what it weighed, and why the answers it reached look almost nothing like ours. If you write historical fiction, fantasy grounded in pre-modern cultures, or secondary worlds that draw on classical or medieval models, this is the architecture beneath every character you build. The intersex body is where the ancient framework becomes most visible—because it's where the modern one fails most obviously. But the framework governed everyone.
The Box
If you think manhood—real, definitional, legal manhood—has always been about what's between your legs, I need you to sit with what I've just told you. A civilization that built the greatest empire in Western history defined it by character.
A civilization that invented democracy, philosophy, and the foundations of Western medicine looked at bodies, ambiguous or otherwise, and read them like texts—weighing every signal, from the skeleton to the spirit, to determine what nature intended. They had legal frameworks for it. They had medical vocabularies for it. They had case law going back centuries.
We look at the same bodies and see nothing.
A Roman jurist would have noted the broad shoulders, the deep voice, the temperament that commanded rooms. A Galenic physician would have read the larynx, the skeletal frame, the aggression, and said: the male sex prevails. A modern GP can look at all of that—every sign the ancient world considered primary evidence—and write “normal healthy female” without a second thought. Not because the signs aren’t there. Because no one taught him to look.
Something happened between the civilization that read the whole person and the one that checks a box at birth and never revisits it. Something political, not scientific. Something that shrank the definition of sex from a holistic assessment down to a single checkbox in a delivery room—and in doing so, made millions of bodies invisible that had previously been merely unusual.
This essay is about what happened, when it happened, and what it costs us that it did.
One Sex
Hermaphroditos was the child of Hermes and Aphrodite—messenger god and love goddess—and when the nymph Salmacis saw him bathing and wrapped herself around him so completely the gods fused them into one body, Ovid described the result with wonder. Not horror nor pity. Not the clinical detachment of a physician confronting a disorder. Wonder. The way you describe something numinous—something that has moved closer to the divine, not further from it.
The Greeks named people whose bodies carried both male and female characteristics after this myth. Hermaphroditos. Not a diagnosis. Not a slur. A name borrowed from a god’s child, because that’s how you describe something the cosmos produced on purpose.
The myth is beautiful. But it’s only the door.
Behind it was an entire medical system that understood sex differently from anything you’ve encountered—and that system dominated Western medicine for two thousand years.
Hippocrates and Galen didn’t see two sexes. They saw one.
Male and female weren’t opposite categories. They were endpoints on a single continuum of vital heat—hot and dry at the male end, cold and wet at the female end—and every human body fell somewhere along it. A woman’s reproductive organs weren’t different structures from a man’s. They were the same structures, folded inward by insufficient heat. Galen described the vagina as an interior penis, the uterus as an undescended scrotum. Not metaphor. Anatomy, as he understood it.
This is what scholars call the one-sex model. Thomas Laqueur, the historian who traced its full arc, put it plainly: for most of Western history, there was one sex with two expressions, not two discrete categories.
This came packaged with something that sometimes presented as a value judgment in the politics of the time. The ancients placed male at the top of the continuum and female at the bottom. In the medical literature, this was primarily a developmental claim—male was the more derived form, female the base state. Aristotle extended it further, arguing that women were deficient not just in vital heat but in rational capacity. Not every ancient thinker agreed with him on that. But the hierarchy of the spectrum itself was consistent across centuries of thought.
Modern developmental biology inverts it. Every human embryo begins on the same blueprint. The default pathway is female. Male differentiation requires a specific hormonal event—a surge of androgens at the right moment. Without it, the body develops along female lines regardless of chromosomes. Female isn’t the incomplete version. It’s the foundation. Male is what happens when additional conditions are met.
The Greeks had the direction backwards. They had the structure right: one design, expressed in degrees.
The ancients also understood something we tend to forget: sex arrives. Before puberty, boys and girls are not dramatically different—same proportions, same voices, same unfinished frames. The Greeks were acutely aware of this. They watched masculinization happen in real time, every generation. Voice dropping, shoulders broadening, hair coming in, temperament hardening. Under the one-sex model, this wasn’t just growth. It was vital heat completing its work—nature declaring what the body was becoming.
Which meant a body that declared itself late wasn’t impossible. It was expected. If sex is a function of heat, and heat can increase over time, then a girl whose body masculinizes at puberty isn’t changing sex. Sex is being declared—for the first time, in earnest—and nature simply took longer than usual to get there.
Now think about what a continuum means for a body that doesn’t sort neatly.
Under a binary, an ambiguous body is a problem. A system error. Something that shouldn’t exist and needs to be corrected—surgically, hormonally, administratively—until it fits one of exactly two categories. The binary cannot afford exceptions, because exceptions prove it isn’t binary.
Under a continuum, that same body is just a body. Positioned unusually, perhaps. But not impossibly. There’s no category it’s failing to fit. There’s no box it broke. It’s a point on a line, and the line has room.
And here’s where it gets directly relevant to anyone writing pre-modern characters—not just “intersex” ones.
Under this model, sex wasn’t fixed at birth and sealed forever. It was understood as unstable. Changeable. Influenced by diet, climate, activity, temperament. Reports of sex changes are common in ancient Greco-Roman literature—and the direction is telling. They are almost exclusively female-to-male. A body that virilized—that grew hair, broadened, deepened—wasn’t experiencing a disorder. It was completing itself. Nature turning up the heat. An imperfect form moving toward its more perfect expression.
The ancients didn’t see this as transgression. They saw it as fulfillment.
If you’re writing a world grounded in classical or medieval models, that distinction matters. Your characters aren’t living in a system where the body’s sex is declared once and questioned never. They’re living in a system where the body is understood to be in process—where what it does over a lifetime is as important as what it looked like at birth, and where virilization is nature’s correction, not nature’s mistake.
That’s a fundamentally different relationship between a person and their body than anything your modern readers take for granted. And it’s the foundation beneath everything that follows.
Prevailing Sex
Roman law did not have a crisis about ambiguous bodies. It had a procedure.
The Digest of Justinian—the sixth-century codification of centuries of Roman legal thought—addresses hermaphrodites directly. Not as curiosities. Not as abominations. As a civil matter. The question wasn’t “what is this person?” It was “which sex predominates in this person?”—because the answer determined inheritance rights, the ability to witness testaments, eligibility for civic duties. The jurist Ulpian held that “predominantly male” hermaphrodites could institute posthumous heirs. Paulus held they could witness legal documents. Both rights reserved exclusively for men.
The mechanism was the “prevailing sex” doctrine. And the assessment was holistic in a way that should embarrass modern medicine. Voice. Build. Bearing. Skeletal frame. Temperament. Body hair. The legal tradition that descended from Roman practice spelled it out explicitly: a person that is bold and sprightly, having a strong voice, much hair on the body, particularly on the chin—these were “certain demonstrations” that the male sex prevailed.
Not genital inspection. Not a chromosome test. Not a half-second glance at a newborn. A full reading of the whole person, conducted when the question actually mattered, using every piece of evidence the body offered.
The law had room. The question is whether anyone actually needed it.
They did. Repeatedly. And the sources name them.
Pliny the Elder—the most respected encyclopedist in the Roman world—documented multiple cases in his Natural History. He cited the eyewitness account of Licinius Mucianus, who personally saw at Argos a man named Arescon “who had been given the name Arescusa and had actually married a husband, and then had grown a beard and developed masculine attributes and had taken a wife.” Read that sequence. Arescusa was raised female. Married a man. Virilized. Became Arescon. Married a woman. The social transition was complete and apparently unremarkable enough that Mucianus could observe it as an established fact while visiting. Nobody burned Arescon at the stake. He was living openly as a man who had formerly been a woman.
Pliny saw another case with his own eyes: "I myself saw in Africa a person who had turned into a male on the day of marriage to a husband; this was Lucius Constitius, a citizen of Thysdritum." Virilized on the wedding day. Took a male Roman name afterward. Was reclassified. Pliny recorded this not as scandal but as natural history. A fact worth documenting.
Diodorus Siculus gives us the most detailed accounts. Callo of Epidaurus was raised as a girl, served as a priestess of Demeter—deeply embedded in feminine social roles. When male anatomy emerged, a physician intervened. After treatment, Callo laid aside her loom-shuttles and all other instruments of woman’s work, took the garb and status of a man, and changed her name by adding a single letter—N—to become Callon.
Look at how methodical that is. The physician treated the condition. The person changed clothes, changed occupation, changed name. There were specific, recognized social steps. This wasn’t chaos. It was a procedure.
There was one complication—because Callon had participated in the women-only rites of Demeter while still living as female, he was brought to trial for impiety. But the trial wasn’t about whether the sex change was legitimate. That was accepted. The trial was about a religious technicality: a man having seen women’s mysteries. The court dealt with the jurisdictional question and moved on.
Then there’s Herais. Born in Arabia, assigned female, married to a man named Samias. While her husband was on a long journey, she developed severe abdominal pain with sudden appearance of male anatomy. Herais changed her name, changed her legal status, and joined the military. She went from wife to soldier. The reclassification was total—and it included admission to the most masculine institution in the ancient world.
Her husband Samias returned and claimed his conjugal rights. It went to court. The court ruled in favor of the reclassification. The legal system adjudicated the question, decided this person was now male, and that was the end of it.
Modern medical researchers who’ve analyzed these accounts have concluded that the spontaneous virilization described in these cases is consistent with 5α-reductase type 2 deficiency or 17β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase mutations—intersex conditions where the body masculinizes at puberty despite female-appearing anatomy at birth. The “miracles” Pliny documented were almost certainly people whose endocrine systems did exactly what the one-sex model predicted: delivered the heat late.
One more case. The one that complicates any reading of this as a system that only worked for people who virilized conveniently.
Favorinus was born around 80 AD in Arelate—modern Arles. He was, by all ancient accounts, intersex. Polemon described him as “a eunuch born without testicles.” Philostratos called him a hermaphrodite. Modern scholars suggest his presentation was consistent with androgen insensitivity syndrome—the opposite of virilization. Beardless. High voice. Soft features. A body that expressed the feminine far more than the masculine.
He became one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the Roman Empire.
He lived on close terms with Plutarch, with Herodes Atticus, with the emperor Hadrian. He mastered Greek as a Gaul. He was accused of adultery with the wife of a man of consular rank—whether true or not, the accusation itself tells you Roman society treated him as a man capable of sexual agency, despite his ambiguous body. He had a bronze statue erected in Athens. He was elected High Priest in the cult of Augustus.
He described himself with three paradoxes: as a Gaul, he mastered Greek; as a eunuch, he was prosecuted for adultery; and he quarreled with the emperor and lived.
The system didn’t just accommodate bodies that resolved neatly toward male. It had room for bodies that didn’t resolve at all—provided the person inside them was extraordinary enough to command it.
And this wasn’t limited to the Greco-Roman world.
Jewish legal tradition developed its own framework—and it was, if anything, more sophisticated. The Talmud identifies at least four categories for atypical sex: androgynos, a person with both male and female characteristics visible; tumtum, a person whose sex is indeterminate or concealed; ay’lonit, a person assigned female at birth who develops male characteristics at puberty; and saris, the reverse, or a castrated male.
Each category carried specific legal rulings—about inheritance, about ritual obligation, about marriage law, about which commandments applied and which didn’t. An ay'lonit, for instance, was exempt from certain obligations that applied to women—because the law recognized that her body was in the process of declaring something else, and the obligations needed to follow the body, not the birth assignment. This wasn’t erasure. It wasn’t flattening. It was a legal system that created more categories than we have now, not fewer, because the bodies existed and the law needed to address them.
The modern binary—male or female, pick one, no exceptions—is not the historical default. Every major legal and medical tradition of the ancient world found ways to accommodate variation without crisis. Greek medicine had a model that predicted it. Roman law had a procedure that processed it. Jewish law had categories that specified it.
The crisis came later. And it was invented for reasons that had nothing to do with medicine or science, nothing to do with law, and nothing to do with bodies at all.
The Rupture
For two thousand years, the one-sex model held. Not because no one questioned it—Galen was debated, Hippocrates was revised, the details shifted century to century—but because the underlying structure survived every revision. One design. A continuum. Sex expressed in degrees, assessed holistically, understood as something the body declared over time.
It ended in the eighteenth century. And it ended for reasons that had nothing to do with anatomy.
The Enlightenment had a problem.
The new political philosophy ran on a single premise: all men are created equal. Natural rights. Liberty as birthright. Authority derived from reason, not from God or blood. This was revolutionary, and the men who articulated it meant it—within limits.
The limit was women.
If all men are created equal, and women are a lesser version of the same thing—cooler, less developed, lower on the same continuum—then the argument for excluding them gets uncomfortable. A lesser version can improve. A lesser version can argue that the gap is smaller than you think, or closing, or irrelevant to the question of citizenship. The one-sex model, which had served perfectly well for two millennia, was suddenly a political liability. It left the door open.
So the door was closed.
The two-sex model emerged in the late eighteenth century—not from some great anatomical discovery, not from a laboratory breakthrough, but from a political need for biological justification. If women aren’t a lesser version of men but an entirely different kind of organism—categorically, fundamentally, in every aspect of body and soul—then exclusion isn’t inequality. It’s just acknowledging nature. You can’t argue your way across an ontological divide.
The French physician Moreau stated it with the clarity of a man who knew exactly what he was building: “Not only are the sexes different, but they are different in every conceivable aspect of body and soul, in every physical and moral aspect.”
Every conceivable aspect. Body and soul.
That's the death of the continuum. Under the old model, body and soul were connected—masculine behavior was evidence of male nature, and the spectrum had room for every gradation between endpoints. Under the new model, male and female are sealed categories. There is no spectrum. There is no gradation. There are two boxes, and every body goes in one.
Thomas Laqueur, the historian who traced this shift most precisely, put it plainly: sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented. The reproductive organs went from being sites for displaying hierarchy to being the foundation of incommensurable difference.
Incommensurable. That’s the word that did the damage. It means: cannot be measured on the same scale. Cannot be compared. So fundamentally different that the old continuum doesn’t apply. Male and female aren’t hot and cold versions of the same design anymore. They’re different designs entirely.
And intersex bodies—which had been unremarkable points on a continuum for two thousand years—became impossible. Not unusual. Not uncommon. Impossible. Because the binary can’t afford exceptions. An exception proves it isn’t binary. So exceptions must be eliminated—reclassified, corrected, sorted into one box or the other—or the entire political architecture that depends on the binary starts to crack.
The sorting mechanism narrowed in stages.
Even within the new two-sex model, physicians in the early nineteenth century still weighed multiple factors when confronted with an ambiguous body. A patient’s build, voice, interests, mannerisms, and the direction of their sexual desire were all considered relevant. Degraded from the Roman holistic assessment, but still something. The body was still being read, even if the reading was being forced toward one of only two conclusions.
By the 1890s, that was gone.
Alice Dreger, the historian who documented this period most thoroughly, calls the era from roughly 1890 to 1915 the “Age of Gonads.” A consensus hardened: “true sex” would be determined by gonadal tissue. Ovarian or testicular. That was it. The voice didn’t matter. The skeleton didn’t matter. The temperament, the bearing, the behavior that a Roman jurist would have catalogued as primary evidence—none of it counted. One tissue type, examined under a microscope, would tell you what a person really was.
There was a problem. You couldn’t examine gonadal tissue in a living patient. Biopsies were rarely performed. The only reliable method was autopsy or castration. Dreger notes that under this standard, true hermaphrodites could only be identified after death. The framework demanded evidence it couldn’t access in the people it was meant to classify.
So in practice, it narrowed further. If you can’t biopsy every ambiguous newborn, you fall back on what you can see. A visual assessment at birth—quick, superficial, based on external genital appearance—became the de facto determination. Not the holistic evaluation of voice, skeleton, temperament, and bearing that had served for millennia. Not even the gonadal inspection that the new doctrine demanded. A glance. A checkbox. A decision made in seconds that the system would never revisit.
Two thousand years of assessment methodology—from the Galenic physician who weighed the whole person, to the Roman jurist who catalogued boldness and voice and frame, to the Talmudic scholars who maintained four distinct categories—collapsed into a binary choice made by whoever happened to be in the delivery room.
Then the doctors decided to make the binary stick.
John Money, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins, developed the “optimum gender of rearing” model in the 1950s. His premise: gender identity is primarily learned, not innate. If you surgically alter an ambiguous infant’s genitalia to match one sex and raise the child accordingly, the child will develop the corresponding identity. The body can be made to fit the box. Early enough intervention, consistent enough reinforcement, and the binary holds.
This wasn’t intentional cruelty. It was medicine. The doctors who performed these surgeries believed they were helping—sparing children the confusion and stigma of ambiguous bodies in a world that demanded clear categories. The logic was sympathetic. The intent was care.
The consequences were irreversible.
Intersex infants—who under the Roman system would have been assessed holistically over time, whose bodies would have been allowed to declare themselves—were surgically assigned in infancy. Tissue was removed. Anatomy was constructed. Decisions were made about who a person was before that person could speak, based on what a surgeon could most plausibly build, not on what the body was trying to become.
If this pattern sounds familiar, it should. The medicalization of homosexuality followed the same arc. Well-intentioned doctors reframed variation as pathology, created a diagnostic framework, and then—because pathology demands treatment—developed interventions that caused enormous harm to the people they were meant to help. Krafft-Ebing’s taxonomy led to conversion therapy. Money’s model led to infant surgery. Both started with compassion. Both ended with people paying for the framework’s failures with their bodies.
The result is the system we have now.
Sex is assigned once, at birth, by visual inspection. The assignment is recorded on a legal document. That document follows the person for life. The framework has no mechanism for reassessment—no procedure for revisiting the initial determination in light of what the body does afterward. A child grows tall. Shoulders broaden. The larynx enlarges. The voice deepens. The temperament is aggressive, commanding, unmistakably male in every dimension the ancient world would have measured. None of these observations lead anywhere in the modern system. There is no diagnostic pathway from “this person’s body is masculinizing” to “perhaps the initial assignment was wrong.” The file was closed in the delivery room. Nothing reopens it.
That’s what was lost. Not just a theory. Not just a medical model. A capacity—the ability to look at a human body and read it honestly, weighing everything it offers, without being blinded by a decision someone else made thirty seconds after birth.
The ancients had that capacity. We threw it away. And we threw it away not because we learned something new about bodies, but because we needed a political binary that couldn’t afford exceptions.
The Conflation
Somewhere in the late twentieth century, intersex got folded into a political coalition it never asked to join.
The reasoning was understandable. People whose bodies don’t conform to the sex binary and people whose identities don’t conform to it seem, from the outside, to share a cause. Both groups are failed by a system that insists on two categories and punishes deviation. Both face medical gatekeeping, legal obstacles, social stigma. The alphabet grew—LGBT became LGBTQI, and intersex was given a letter, slotted into a spectrum of gender and sexual nonconformity as though it belonged to the same conversation.
It doesn’t. Not because one experience is more legitimate than the other, but because they are medically different things, and collapsing them into a single political category has costs that intersex people disproportionately bear.
Gender dysphoria is a psychological diagnosis. It describes a mismatch between a person’s experienced gender identity and the sex they were assigned at birth. The treatment pathway is psychiatric evaluation, followed—if appropriate—by hormone therapy and potentially surgery. The framework is built around identity: what the patient reports feeling, how they understand themselves, what they need their body to become. The patient is understood to be changing something.
An intersex condition is a congenital physiological reality. It is diagnosed by endocrinology, confirmed by bloodwork, visible in bone structure and hormonal panels and tissue. It isn’t about identity. It isn’t about what the patient feels. It’s about what the body is—what it has been since before birth—and the treatment pathway is corrective, not transformative. The patient isn’t changing their sex. They’re demanding that medicine acknowledge the sex that was already there and was misread.
That distinction is not academic. It determines which doctor you see, which treatment you receive, which legal framework governs your documentation, and—critically—whether the medical system understands you as someone who wants to become something or someone who already is something and needs the record corrected.
When those two experiences are merged under one political umbrella, the intersex patient disappears. Not deliberately. Not maliciously. But effectively. The language of the coalition defaults to the more visible, more politically organized, more culturally legible experience—which is the trans experience. “Gender-affirming care” becomes the umbrella term. “Transition” becomes the assumed narrative. The entire medical and legal conversation orients around the premise that the patient is crossing from one sex to another.
An intersex patient isn’t crossing anything. There is no transition. There is a body that was incorrectly classified, and a medical system that needs to catch up to what the body has been saying all along. Framing that as “transition” doesn’t just misrepresent the experience—it actively undermines the patient’s claim. If you’re “transitioning,” you’re asking to become male. If you’re intersex, you’re stating that you are male and always were, and the initial assignment was wrong. Those are opposite legal and medical arguments, and conflating them weakens both.
I know this because I lived the distinction—though “lived” implies more agency than the process actually allowed.
When my parents brought me to a GP to help explain why their child insisted he was male, the doctor looked at a body with broad shoulders, an enlarged larynx, facial hair, body hair and a masculine skeletal frame, and wrote “normal healthy female.” He didn’t investigate. He didn’t order bloodwork. He looked at the chart, looked at me, and decided the chart was right.
Sometime later, a doctor at a gender clinic noted my adam’s apple with visible shock and asked if it was surgical. It wasn’t. It was mine. It had always been mine. But the question tells you everything about the framework—a masculine larynx on a patient assigned female was so incomprehensible that the first assumption was that someone must have built it.
I went to a urologist out of sheer defiance. My bones kept breaking in the military—a classic symptom of male hypogonadism that no one investigated because the chart said female and female bones break sometimes, apparently. I had done enough research by then to suspect what was wrong, and I thought I could argue that I needed testosterone to mineralize my skeleton. My bloodwork came back so textbook male hypogonadal that the urologist was prepared to treat me—until he saw my chart and realized my birth assignment didn't match the bloodwork. He stopped. But he confirmed that my LH signal should have been suppressed on exogenous testosterone, and the fact that it wasn’t was evidence of a male HPG axis. He told me to see an endocrinologist.
Fair advice. But here’s the absurdity: every time I presented my full medical history honestly—every time I trusted the institution and disclosed my early classification—the system couldn’t process me. I was too honest for the framework. I kept handing doctors context they had no pathway for, and they kept freezing. The diagnosis finally came by accident when an endocrinologist looked at me cold, with no history, assumed I was male because that’s what the body in front of him looked like, and only then learned the birth certificate disagreed. He got it right because he didn’t know the wrong answer first.
Most people with my condition don’t have the defiance (virtus?) to keep demanding answers after decades of institutional failure. Most people trust the system when it tells them they’re wrong about their own body. I didn’t—but I shouldn’t have had to fight that hard for a diagnosis a Roman physician could have made by looking at me.
The Architecture
If you write historical fiction set before the eighteenth century, you have been building on a foundation that didn’t exist yet.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s nearly impossible to avoid. The two-sex binary is so deeply embedded in modern thinking that it feels like a fact of nature rather than a product of history. When you write a medieval lord assessing his heir, or a Roman senator evaluating a young officer, or a Greek physician examining a patient, you import the binary by default—because it’s the only framework you’ve ever known. You write characters who live in a world that didn’t see sex the way you do, and you never notice, because the anachronism is invisible.
Now you can see it.
Everything this essay has described—the continuum, the holistic assessment, the legal accommodation, the capacity to read a body over a lifetime rather than classifying it in a single glance—is architecture. It’s the load-bearing structure beneath how pre-modern cultures understood bodies, assigned roles, processed variation, and organized themselves. If you’re building a secondary world that draws on classical, medieval, or early modern models, this is the foundation your world should be standing on. Not because representation demands it. Because accuracy demands it.
A world built on a one-sex continuum doesn’t produce the same institutions as one built on a sealed binary. Its medicine works differently—physicians assess the whole person, and the same body can be reclassified over time without crisis. Its law works differently—courts weigh evidence from skeleton, voice, temperament, and bearing, not just anatomy. Its military works differently—entry is determined by demonstrated capacity, not by a checkbox at birth. Its religion works differently—categories like the Talmud’s androgynos and ay’lonit and tumtum reflect a theology that had room for complexity, not one that demanded simplification.
These aren’t details. They’re the skeleton of the culture. Get them wrong and the world feels modern in period costume. Get them right and the world breathes.
This is what I built Nhera on.
My first essay in this series—”The Homosexual Was Invented in 1869”—described how pre-modern cultures understood desire without the modern categories of sexual identity. That essay was the first wall. This essay is the second. Together, they form the architecture beneath every human culture in my world: a civilization where sex is a continuum assessed holistically, where desire is understood as behavior rather than identity, and where the frameworks that would eventually flatten both into sealed categories haven’t been invented yet—because the political conditions that demanded them don’t exist.
The elves of Nhera take it further. Their bodies express no sexual dimorphism at all. Their language has no gendered pronouns—instead, address is determined by the relationship between speakers: active and passive, senior and junior, the dynamics of the conversation itself. When humans interact with elves, they stumble over this constantly, trying to map their gendered language onto beings for whom the concept doesn't apply. The confusion is deliberate. It's what happens when two species—one that sorts bodies into categories, one that doesn't—try to communicate across a gap that neither fully understands.
For the human cultures, the framework is closer to what this essay describes. Sex is assessed, not assigned. What a person does, how they carry themselves, what the body declares over time—these carry weight. But Nhera also adds something the ancient world didn’t have to contend with: a sentient ocean that wants to kill everyone equally. The Fathom doesn’t care who has breasts. It doesn’t check what’s between your legs before it drowns you. When the sea is trying to eat your civilization, you cannot afford to bench half your population over a genital configuration—and you cannot afford to care who your best navigator sleeps with when the alternative is everyone dies.
Survival is a solvent. It dissolves the luxuries of prejudice very quickly, and the sealed binary is a luxury—one invented by a society comfortable enough to spend its political energy on exclusion. Nhera’s cultures aren’t comfortable. They’re besieged. The frameworks they build reflect that.
None of this required a treatise on gender theory in the novel. It lives in the bones of the world—in how a physician speaks to a patient, in how a court processes a legal question, in what a commanding officer weighs when assessing a subordinate. The reader doesn’t need to know the history. They need to feel the world operating on a logic that isn’t theirs. If the bones are right, they will.
The Raw Material
The first essay gave you the framework for desire. This one gives you the framework for bodies. Together, they’re the scaffolding beneath every secondary world that takes its pre-modern setting seriously—not as costume but as structure.
But knowing what to dismantle is only the first step.
The second step—the one that actually matters for your craft—is what you build once the scaffolding is exposed. Because here’s what most secondary worlds get wrong: they don’t fail at representation. They fail at imagination. They import the sexual binary wholesale, drop it into a medieval setting, and call it worldbuilding. They import heterosexuality-as-identity, homosexuality-as-deviance, and the entire diagnostic framework that was invented in 1869, and they never notice—because they think it’s always been there. It hasn’t. You’ve now read two essays proving it hasn’t.
So the real question isn’t “how do I include diverse characters?” It’s: what happens when you strip away every framework your culture invented in the last two centuries and start from the raw material? What does a civilization actually build when it hasn’t been handed the binary, the identity categories, the diagnostic labels? What do your characters believe about their own bodies when nobody has told them to sort themselves into two boxes?
That’s where genuine creativity starts. Not in adding representation to a modern framework. In removing the modern framework entirely and discovering what grows in its place.
The third essay, when it comes, will be about that.
This essay drops on my birthday. I don't usually indulge in personal writing on this platform—the craft comes first—but if there's one day a year to write about something that shaped me, this is probably it.
What’d you think? Did you learn something? Subscribe for more things literally no one else in creative spaces is talking about.
Fair winds,
D. S. Black