MM: What is your perspective on transgenderism?
SJ: I understand transgenderism to be a diagnosis of the medical profession constructed in the late 20th century … it seems to have come from work that was being done by sexologists in the mid 20th century when the sexological profession – endocrinologists and so on – invented the idea of gender (I know feminists took up that term, but the term was invented by sexologists in the mid 20th century) and they invented that term in connection with their work on children that they identified as intersex in order to work out what surgery they should do on those children to make them what gender, and they understood gender to be largely socially constructed but partly biologically constructed…
Read the transcript and listen to the audio of Meghan Murphy’s interview with Sheila Jeffreys here.