"the technical construction of sexual difference" (Preciado 105)
"In order to ensure that their external 'sexual' development could be identified as feminine, newborns declared to be 'intersex' because they possessed a 'micro-penis' [...] had it amputated, and their genitals were reconstructed in the form of a vagina, after which they received hormone-substitution therapy" (100)
a "clinical notion of gender invented by [John] Money" (111) which functions, "above all as an instrument of rationalization"
essentially, "Money tampered with the bodies of infants to force them into the category of 'male gender' or 'female gender'" (101)
"Dr. Henry Benjamin [by contrast] administered estrogens and progesterone to a new kind of patient of state-managed medicine: an adult who claims not to identify with the gender that was assigned at birth" (101)
"the criteria for sex assignment that permit a decision regarding whether or not a body is 'female' or 'male' at the moment of birth (or in utero, using a sonogram) depend on a model of visual recognition that is supposedly empirical [...] [It] depends on an optical ontology: the real is what you can see" (101-2)*
"On the other hand, the idea that posits a true 'psychological sex' distinct from the one that has been assigned at birth--in other words, a subjective conviction of being a 'man' or a 'woman'--belongs to the model of radical invisibility [...] the real isn't accessible to the senses and is by definition what cannot be apprehended by empirical means. The two models can function together thanks to a single metaphysical axis that attaches them as it opposes them"
Note that Preciadio argues "the visual criteria that govern sex assignment at birth are not a biological event any more than are the psychological criteria that lead to the 'inner' criteria" (102) -- I'm not sure how to win that argument, though [see separate note on 'physical genitals']
"in 1980, the anthropologist Susan [Suzanne?] Kessler will denounce the aesthetic codes (relying on the shape and form of the penis and the clitoris) that dominate medical protocol for the assignment of sex to newborns"