David O. Cauldwell’s work about the effects of forcible 'sex transmutation'

Effects of Castration on Men and Women is a lesser-known work of the early twentieth-century sexologist David O. Cauldwell, M.D., published by Haldeman-Julius in 1947. The 32-page book is written to be widely accessible: it relies on only a very basic medical understanding of glands and hormones, and it uses simple vocabulary and short, direct sentences.

Cauldwell defined castration as the removal of the testicles, possible from the earliest times in human history, or — as became possible much later — the ovaries.

The discussion of the castration of women is restricted to the third and fourth of ten chapters. He pointed out that abdominal surgery is dangerous, and he complained that some "eugenically minded" surgeons of the time preferred to thus sterilize a woman than to offer other forms of birth control.

Although he lamented that some women are unnecessarily operated upon, his opinion was that, while a man prefers losing "a leg or an eye" to castration, a woman is bothered by castration no more than by losing "the tonsils or the appendix." Furthermore, while a man tends to hide such an affliction, a woman "goes about broadcasting her condition to almost anyone who will listen." No doubt this overstatement contributed toward his overall focus on men.

He found it either important or entertaining to reference the ancient Babylonian myth of the Descent of Ishtar, in which, when the goddess went underground, humans and animals stopped having sex. The other gods decided that Ishtar must be brought back, but they believed that it would be inappropriate to send either a man or a woman, so they castrated a man and sent him to recover the goddess. Cauldwell's opinion is that this myth originated to provide "some reason...for this particular kind of man's inhumanity to man."

The Biblical kings Solomon and David mutilated their enemies. This forcible sexual mutilation was, he opined, less civilized behavior than the scalping practiced by American Indians who were generally deemed by the Europeans to be entirely uncivilized. This kind of racialized appeal has an interesting, if unclear, effect in a work that generally defends the eugenic approach popular in that era.

A castrated male child, Cauldwell wrote, "never actually becomes a man," and though intelligent will be "invariably devoid of the ability to exercise mature judgement in matters of consequence"; he contrasted this with eunuchs who may "have regular coitus" if castrated in adulthood. He complained of the irony that, "like religious celibates, they [eunuchs] often undertake to legislate a pattern or a set of patterns for sexually normal people."

Other famous eunuchs he cited include Potiphar, the servant of the Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus; Domitian's favored boy, Earinus; and Tarses, eighteenth-century general and king of Persia.

He explained that Judge Frank Collier in California had recently set a precedent for offering convicted child molesters the Hobson's choice of lifelong prison or castration; it became popularly known as "Collier's Choice."

Cauldwell (1897-1959) is known as one of the first sexologists to have used the word "transsexual." In this book, he titled the fourth chapter "Desire for Surgical Sex Transmutation: An Insane Fancy of Near Males." This sounds like it tells you everything one needs to know about Cauldwell's opinion about gender nonconformism. Indeed, he goes on to refer to crossdressing men as having a "mental twist" possibly indicating "glandular pathology." He colorfully introduces the topic with this hypothetical: "Should someone tell you that your next door neighbor, a hard-working man by day, discarded his rough work clothing upon reaching home at night, bathed, shaved closely, and donned feminine make-up and finery for his evening's relaxation, you might be both startled and surprised." Some might feel that this slightly sensationalizes the topic. However, if he did not exactly defend the dignity of transsexuals, he at least provided some validation of their feelings and their existence.

Of "inverts," a.k.a. "homosexual" men – which he confused somewhat with transsexual women, who in turn were conflated with people with a Freudian "castration complex" – he was careful to say not that they are guilty of criminal sex acts, but rather that they are "guilty of what the law chooses to call criminal sex acts." After all, some people are "willing to label almost anything connected with sex as criminal." This language that seems too subtle today would have been read as a pointed objection to the criminalization of homosexuality when it was published 56 years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sweeping laws against consensual sex acts known as "sodomy" were unconstitutional.

Cauldwell's opinion was that doctors were in a better position than legislators "to remedy sick minds," and he looked forward to the day when "the leprous hands of thin-brained censors are forever purged from the affairs of mankind." Censors of books, he said, prevent the general public from obtaining information and are "so-called humans who are worse social misfits" than many psychiatric patients.

He indicated that, when he received a letter of inquiry from a gay man who said with respect to his lover "I want to change my sex for him," he told the individual that such surgery was irreversible and occasionally fatal. He advised the man to act on behalf of his own authentic self and not for the sake of what he thought his lover wanted, and he suggested that the man request testosterone or psychiatric medication before seeking surgical sex reassignment. (Testosterone had been isolated and synthesized only a few years earlier; he did caution later in the book that "any attempt at self-treatment with hormone preparations is a foolish waste of money.")

After he published this letter of response – which one might anticipate would be somewhat off-putting to parties interested in sex reassignment – "innumerable requests were received for further information" about "surgical sex transmutation." Evidently, there was an unmet need for information about the topic. It is sobering to think that this book might have been the first meaningful information resource that some people in the 1940s put their hands on – and that, decades earlier, there was even less available to the public.

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More info: Mallory Moore has written about Cauldwell (Medium, Dec 20, 2022)

Image: A person dances in a jaguar-print suit somewhere between 1910-1915. © George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress). No known copyright restrictions. Flickr.

Racial language in an 1891 text on circumcision

Dr. Peter Charles Remondino's History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present is an American medical text from 1891 that strongly advocates circumcision for health reasons. It relies on anecdotal evidence and racially tinged rhetoric to a ridiculous extent, making it a curious artifact. The book also examines other forms of genital mutilation under the supposition, shared by previous authors such as Friedrich Bergmann of Strasburg, that they are connected. He was also influenced by William Alexander Hammond's Male Impotence.

Remondino uses the word "prepuce" for what most people today call the "foreskin" on males. He believes that this unnecessary, deleterious skin will eventually disappear as humans continue to evolve, but in the meantime, he recommends circumcision because it promotes "better health, greater capacity for labor, longer life, less nervousness, sickness, loss of time, and less doctor-bills, as well as it increases their chances for a euthanasian death." He met one family for whom this skin was congenitally missing in the males, and deemed them a family that "is naturally one of more than superior physical health and intelligence."

He admits to circumcising two of his sons for the "malformation" of a "very long but thin and narrow prepuce" and to circumcising many other young patients "to improve the temper and disposition of children". (He sagely discourages, however, surgeons from carving "any distinctive or distinguishing marks, like an individual baronial crest, on the head of the organ".)

History

His speculation about the ancient origins of circumcision leads him to the warrior practice of cutting the genitals from the enemy as a trophy. (This led, he speculates, to the discovery of castration as a useful thing to do to slaves and prisoners of war who were to be kept alive.) He is aware of religious influence from groups that practiced phallic worship, and acknowledges that, In Greek mythology, "the first eunuch was a god and a king" (that is, Uranos). Accepting Herodotus as a source, he dates circumcision for hygienic reasons in Egypt back to the sixth century BCE under Psammétich.

He disagrees with an idea promoted by Herodotus that the Jews modeled their rite of circumcision on that of the ancient Egyptians. He points out that the Egyptians only circumcised their boys after age 13, whereas the Jews circumcise infants. There is also some fuzzy argumentation about the worship of the benign, monotheistic Biblical God being incompatible with hero-warrior circumcision or phallic worship. Nor, he said, could circumcision have been a modification of  a castration practice, the latter being totally forbidden in the Bible. (It is, of course, common for people to modify practices to avoid what is religiously forbidden, so this argument does not hold water.) He also says that the Jews "never made any alteration or improvement in the manner of performing the operation" (which is incorrect – refer to the Brit Peri'ah, c. 140 CE). He concludes that "we must accept its origin as a purely religious rite" – whatever that means!

Religious rite or not, he insists that it confers health benefits. Jews, he says, survive their sedentary indoor lifestyle only because of circumcision: "Were an uncircumcised race so to live, scrofula and phthisis would be the inevitable result," he writes. He claims that Jews have "a very small percentage of feeble-minded", do not have "reflex neuroses", and do not contract syphilis, all of which benefits are attributed to circumcision. (Here, it is worth noting that a 2009 paper from the U.S. NIH found that circumcision confers no protection from syphilis.)

He complains that, today, some Jews admit converts without demanding circumcision. They ignore "the inseparability of the moral from the physical nature of man" and moreover "to do away with one ordinance in any arbitrary manner is to gradually begin to crumble down the whole fabric of Judaism." Without revealing his own religious beliefs, Remondino twice gives his broader opinion that the professions of priest and doctor should be united again, as they were in olden days, but he does not elaborate on what this would look like in practice.

Language about race

He reveals unutterably strange beliefs about other races that would be unpublishable today. He compares the "dark and mysterious as well as peculiar" prepuce – that is, the foreskin itself! – to "Bret Harte's 'Heathen Chinee'." One patient was tormented by surgical wounds that woke him from sleep "as effectually as an Indian would in scalping him"; those who sit in cold places will meet with "prostatic troubles" like "the treacherous Indian lying in ambush". He claims that the "ancient Germans" were chaste until marriage, thus avoiding becoming "enervated" or reproducing while too young, producing offspring that contributed to the "superior physical development of the race," while inhabitants of Eastern, "warm countries" required infibulation to enforce chastity. He reports little change "in religion, morals, or physique" affecting the race descended from Ishmael over the last several thousand years. (It is unclear to what race he intends to refer. If he is referring to Islam, the religion isn't yet a thousand years old and isn't a race.) Of course, none of this makes any sense.

Cornelius Pauw's work Philosophical Researches on the Americans (1772) concluded that circumcision only exists in certain latitudes, which Remondino finds "ingenious and plausible." Thus he sees a "faulty construction of the human body developed in certain climatic conditions." He adds that girls from northern places have fat like whale blubber, and, when men sleep with them, the girls suck the heat from them rather than imparting heat to them.

Guardians of Sudanese harems, he says, required women to wear a chastity belt if they went out in public unattended, he reports, based on Col. Raoul du Bisson's Les Femmes, Les Eunuchs, et Les Guerrieres du Soudan. The device was worn internally and made it painful to walk. Remondino calls this custom a "probable necessity" to enforce chastity, given that divorce was impossible in the Sudan. He denies that it was a "compulsory barbarity" since, if the Sudanese woman didn't want to wear it, she could choose to stay home. He comments that it might also be useful to encourage marital fidelity in the United States; whether this is an attempt at humor is unclear.

He warns that the cannibalistic Caribs castrated their prisoners to improve their taste, but assures the reader that they only ate vegetarians. He observes that foreskin can be used for skin grafts, which is true, and oddly warns that white men should "avoid adverse cosmetic effects" of grafting skin from darker people who have "strong animal vitality" that will cause the skin to grow. 

The character of eunuchs

To the extent that his book covers castration, too, Remondino describes eunuchs as having a "stolid indifference...to any or all sentiments of humanity" and "hold the rest of humanity in continual execration." When they engage in sexual activity, they are at risk for "a marasmus ending in galloping consumption". Sadly, "the future proceedings of men and things on earth do not much interest those unfortunate members of society in any great degree, interest in worldly affairs and testicles seemingly having been as intimately connected in those early and remote days as with us of the present..."

Some "exceptional cases" result in "eunuchs holding the highest offices in the State under the reigns of Alexander, the Ptolemys, Lysimachus, Mithrades, Nero, and Arcadius. The eunuch Aristonikos, under one of the Ptolemys, and another, Narces, under Justinian, led the armies of their sovereigns."

In their favor, eunuchs have "docility and pliability" and "no incentive either to run away or to embezzle". So why, he asks, not castrate today's bankers and national legislators?

Conclusion

"Why are we afflicted with a prepuce?" Remondino laments. It is a "Job's-comforts-dispensing enemy of man." Uncircumcised children are more likely to blamelessly suffer "perversion, stupidity, and irritability of the mind or temper", while women will be unhappy "with a husband partly eunuchised by a constricted prepuce", which is probably the "unconscious power" behind many women's appeals for divorce. He recommends circumcision for both male and female children to "greatly reduce the number of paralytics, feeble-minded, and generally deficient of both sexes" and to cure the "results of reflex neuroses".

This work of rhetoric is instructive today as a historical look at attitudes about race, gender, and sexuality, with an eye specifically toward castration and circumcision.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Oct. 4, 2013.

Image: Entombment of Christ, 1672, in Saint-Martin Church in Arc-en-Barrois (Haute-Marne, France). Photographed 2008 by user 'Vassil'. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Wikimedia Commons.