“The Law of Gender” – A Book by Laure Murat on How the “Third Sex” Was Invented in 19th-Century France
The work explores how medicine, police, and literature shaped representations of trans people and homosexuals from 1835 to 1939.
In April 2026, Flammarion published a reprint of Laure Murat’s book The Law of Gender: A Cultural History of the Third Sex (La loi du genre: Une histoire culturelle du troisième sexe).
The French researcher explains how society in the 19th and first half of the 20th century attempted to bring under control people who did not fit into the usual framework of male and female.
The book covers the period from 1835 to 1939. During this time, the concept of the “third sex” emerged in France. At the time, it was an umbrella term. It was used to describe anyone who violated gender norms: homosexual men, women in men’s suits, androgynous feminists, and so on.
The main idea of Murat’s study is to show how non-standard sexuality and gender behavior ceased to be merely a crime and became a disease during that time.
She relies on unpublished police archives, medical treatises, and literature. Murat describes how the Parisian police during the era of Honoré de Balzac conducted raids on so-called “aunties” (tantinettes) – feminine men who gathered in secret clubs.
By the end of the 19th century, psychiatrists had taken over from the police. They began to study “inverts” (people with “inverted” gender identity and sexuality) and to debate whether this trait was innate or acquired. Behavior that had previously interested only the courts became an object of science.
A separate chapter is devoted to women’s emancipation: the appearance of the bicycle in the 1880s and the fashion for trousers destroyed the traditional image of a woman, causing panic among moralists. The book concludes with the 1930s, when the first documented accounts of trans experience and attempts at surgical transition appeared.
In addition to medical and police documents, Laure Murat analyzes how the “third sex” was reflected in French prose. She thoroughly examines the works of Marcel Proust, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, and André Gide. Professional critics particularly highlight this part of the study. Historian Aude Fauvel, in a review for the journal Clio, notes that the analysis of Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) is one of the work’s strongest points.
Reviews from the academic community emphasize Murat’s main conclusion: each era creates its own vocabulary to describe those who challenge it. The Law of Gender proves that our modern medical and social ideas about gender are not eternal truths, but a construct, the result of a historical process.
