In Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, Alice Dreger examines the medical treatment of patients with ambiguous genitalia in late nineteenth and early-twentieth-century France and Great Britain. She aims to uncover the roots of medicine's preoccupation with enforcing "normative" notions of masculinity and femininity. According to Dreger, the rising numbers of hermaphrodites during this period was a product of both medical developments and broader social concern.
The advent of gynecology as a medical specialty, combined with a greater access to medical care, meant that larger numbers of people in France and Britain received medical examinations. Concurrently, an increase in the number of feminists, homosexuals, and other individuals
