Marañón, intersexuality and the biological construction of gender in 1920s Spain.

In an important essay, Mary Nash explored the ways in which 'biological essentialism' replaced religious criteria as the key component in the construction of gender differentiation in early twentieth-century Spain. There she notes that even though the biological model retained the traditional role of women as mothers and childbearers, the value neutrality of this role and the premise of social equality between the sexes was, somewhat paradoxically, 'liberating for many Spanish women'.l Gregorio Marañón, prominent in the sexual reform movement in Spain of the 1920s and early 1930s, was the founder of endocrinology as a discipline in Spain and was both a theoretician and a clinician.2 As a theoretician his métier was the endocrinology of sex and sexual differentiation; because of his professional prominence and high public visibility, he became the inevitable reference point for all such discussions. His clinical practice was marked by the fact that it took place in the heyday of hormonal determinism. There were broad areas of overlap between the theoretical and practical aspects of his professionallife.