Medicating Sex in the GDR

The research project examines the concrete implementation of medical concepts and treatment paradigms in the clinical treatment of intersex people in the GDR between 1950 and 1990. Building on the work of Ulrike Klöppel (2010), who has identified the key scientific and institutional developments in the treatment of intersexuality in the FGR and GDR, the project focuses on the local implementation and practical application of these concepts in everyday clinical practice. The project examines how medical concepts for the treatment of people with intersex characteristics between 1950 and 1990 in the GDR were translated into concrete clinical routines, decision-making processes, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Particular attention is paid to the reception, concrete adaption, and transformation of John Money’s “optimum gender of rearing” (OGR) model in GDR clinics. Institutional routines, interdisciplinary negotiations, and actual treatment practices are examined, initially using the example of the University Children’s Hospital in Leipzig, supplemented by comparisons with other locations such as Rostock and Berlin. The project’s methodology combines historical source-critical analysis of medical publications, unpublished archival materials, and oral history interviews with former clinicians. The latter in particular allows implicit knowledge structures, dynamics of interdisciplinary cooperation, and patterns of action beyond published concepts to be captured. The aim of the project is to reconstruct the clinical practice of gender assignment and adjustment in the GDR from a praxeological perspective.

 

Aims

• Reconstruct practice: Reconstruct how gender ambiguity was negotiated and translated into concrete routines, decisions and interdisciplinary collaboration in GDR clinics (e.g. Leipzig), capturing regional variants and the implicit logics of clinical work through archival sources, medical periodicals and oral-history interviews
• Trace continuities and assess present practice: identify epistemic and normative continuities and shifts in treatment across 1950-1990 to historically contextualize and thereby critically evaluate, contemporary approaches to care for people with variations in sex characteristics