“We’ll know in a little while.”
The tissue mass up inside Felicity Kennington’s inguinal canal turned out to be, when they put a sample under the microscope, testicular. At that time—this was in 1961—such a fact designated Felicity Kennington as male. Since the nineteenth century, medicine had been using the same primitive diagnostic criterion of sex formulated by Edwin Klebs way back in 1876. Klebs had maintained that a person’s gonads determined sex. In cases of ambiguous gender, you looked at the gonadal tissue under the microscope. If it was testicular, the person was male; if ovarian, female. But there were problems inherent in this method. And these became clear to Luce when he saw what happened to Felicity Kennington in 1961. Even though she looked like a girl and thought of herself as a girl, because she possessed male gonads Budekind declared her to be a boy. The parents objected. Other doctors were consulted—endocrinologists, urologists, geneticists—but they couldn’t agree, either. Meanwhile, as the medical community vacillated, Felicity began to go through puberty. Her voice deepened. She grew sparse tufts of light brown facial hair. She stopped going to school and soon stopped leaving the house altogether. Luce saw her one last time, when she came in for another consultation. She wore a long dress and a scarf that tied under her chin, covering most of her face. In one nail-bitten hand she carried a copy of Jane Eyre. Luce bumped into her at the drinking fountain. “Water tastes like rust,” she said, looking up at him with no recognition and hurrying away. A week later, with her father’s .45 automatic, she killed herself.
“Proves she was a boy,” Budekind said in the cafeteria the next day.
“What do you mean?” said Luce.
“Boys kill themselves with guns. Statistically. Girls use less violent methods. Sleeping pills, carbon monoxide poisoning.”
Luce never spoke to Budekind again. His meeting with Felicity Kennington was a watershed moment. From then on, he dedicated himself to making sure that something like that never happened to anyone again. He threw himself into the study of intersex conditions. He read everything available on the subject, which wasn’t much. And the more he studied and the more he read, the more he became convinced that the sacred categories of male and female were, in fact, shams. With certain genetic and hormonal conditions, it was just plain impossible to say what sex some babies were. But humans had historically resisted the obvious conclusion. Confronted with a baby of uncertain sex, the Spartans would leave the infant on a rocky hillside and walk quickly away. Luce’s own forebears, the English, didn’t even like to mention the subject and might never have done so, had the nuisance of enigmatic genitalia not thrown a wrench into the smooth workings of inheritance law. Lord Coke, the great English jurist of the seventeenth century, tried to clear up the matter of who’d get the landed estate by declaring that a person should “be either male or female, and it shall succeed according to the kind of sex which doth prevail.” Of course, he didn’t specify a method for determining which sex did prevail. It took the German Klebs to come along and begin the task. Then, a hundred years later, Peter Luce finished it.
In 1965, Luce published an article called “Many Roads Lead to Rome: Sexual Concepts of Human Hermaphroditism.” In twenty-five pages, Luce argued that gender is determined by a variety of influences: chromosomal sex; gonadal sex; hormones; internal genital structures; external genitals; and, most important, the sex of rearing. Often a patient’s gonadal sex didn’t determine his or her gender identity. Gender was more like a native tongue. Children learned to speak Male or Female, the way they learned to speak English or French.
The article made a big splash. Luce could still remember how, in the weeks following its publication, people gave him a new quality of attention: women laughed at his jokes more, made it known they were available, even on a few occasions showed up at his apartment wearing not a hell of a lot; his phone rang more often; the people on the other end were people he didn’t know but who knew him; they had offers and beguilements; they wanted him to review papers, serve on panels, appear at the San Luis Obispo Snail Festival to judge an escargot contest, most snails being, after all, diecious. Within months, pretty much everyone had given up Klebs’s criterion for Luce’s criteria.
On the strength of this success, Luce was given the opportunity to open a psychohormonal unit at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. In a decade of solid, original research, he made his second great discovery: that gender identity is established very early on in life, at about the age of two. After that, his reputation reached the stratosphere. The funding flowed in, from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the NIH. It was a great time to be a sexologist. The Sexual Revolution had opened a brief window of opportunity for the enterprising sex researcher. It was a matter of national interest, for a few years there, to get to the bottom of the mystery of the female orgasm. Or to plumb the psychological reasons that certain men exhibited themselves on the street. In 1968, Dr. Luce opened the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic, and it soon became the foremost facility in the world for the study and treatment of conditions of ambiguous gender. Luce treated everybody: the web-necked teens with Turner’s syndrome; the leggy beauties with androgen insensitivity; the surly Klinefelter’s cases, who, without exception, either broke the water cooler or tried to punch out a nurse. When a baby was born with ambiguous genitalia, Dr. Luce was called in to discuss the matter with the shocked parents. Luce got transsexuals, too. Everybody came to the clinic; at his disposal Luce had a body of research material—of living, breathing specimens—that no scientist had ever had before.
It was 1968, and the world was going up in flames. Luce held one of the torches. Two thousand years of sexual tyranny were ending in the blaze. Not one coed in his behavioral-cytogenetics lecture course wore a bra to class. Luce wrote op-ed pieces for the Times calling for the revision of the penal code regarding socially harmless and nonviolent sex offenders. He handed out pro-contraceptive pamphlets at coffeehouses in the Village. That was how it went in science. Every generation or so, insight, diligence, and the necessities of the moment came together to lift a scientist’s work out of the academy and into the culture at large, where it gleamed, a beacon of the future.