Weakening the sex: The medicalisation of female gender identity in New Spain

In the surgical and anatomical books written in Europe during the sixteenth century the bodies studied and described were, by and large, those of men.¹ Medical authors could recommend adapting a given procedure to the needs of a female patient so as to account for a difference in body mass, or treatments could be modified to suit a woman’s colder and wetter temperament, but the description of bodily structures and substances not directly linked to generation—bile, bones, eyes—these were generally not marked as female. Male templates were preferred when it came to illustrating information that would apply to