Social Studies of Science 2014, Vol. 44(5) 657–679 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0306312714531349 sss.sagepub.com Description of sex difference as prescription for sex change: On the origins of facial feminization surgery Eric D Plemons Society of Fellows and Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Abstract This article explores the research project that led to the development of facial feminization surgery, a set of bone and soft tissue reconstructive surgical procedures intended to feminize the faces of male-to-female trans- women. Conducted by a pioneering surgeon in the mid-1980s, this research consisted of three steps: (1) assessments of sexual differences of the skull taken from early 20th- century physical anthropology, (2) the application of statistical analyses taken from late 20th-century orthodontic research, and (3) the vetting of this new morphological and metric knowledge in a dry skull collection. When the ‘feminine type’ of early 20th-century physical anthropology was made to articulate with the ‘female mean’ of 1970s’ statistical analysis, these two very different epistemological artifacts worked together to produce something new: a singular model of a distinctively female skull. In this article, I show how the development of facial feminization surgery worked across epistemic styles, transforming historically racialized and gendered descriptions of sex difference into contemporary surgical prescriptions for sex change. Fundamental to this transformation was an explicit invocation of the scientific origins of facial sexual dimorphism, a claim that frames surgical sex change of the face as not only possible, but objectively certain. Keywords facial feminization surgery, physical anthropology, sex reassignment surgery, transsexual Early surgical procedures intended to change a person’s sex focused on the genitals as the site of a body’s maleness or femaleness and took the reconstruction of these organs Corresponding author: Eric D Plemons, Society of Fellows and Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 101 West Hall, 1085 South University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. Email: eplemons@umich.edu 531349SSS 0 0 10.1177/0306312714531349Social Studies of Science X(X)Plemons research-article 2014 Article at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on March 17, 2015 sss.sagepub.com Downloaded from