When, in the middle of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the protagonist awakens to find ‘he was a woman’ (O 137), the narrator does not linger on causes and explanations. Remarkably casual in the face of the transformation, she offers merely the ‘simple fact’ that ‘Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since’ (O 139). There is then little to add, other than to normalise the metamorphosis further: ‘the change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it’ (O 139). Woolf's narrator admits ‘many people’ will think ‘such a change in sex is against nature’, but she refuses to sensationalise or explicate the event, leaving it to ‘other pens [to] treat of sex and sexuality’ (O 139). As to the identity of these ‘other pens’, she offers only a hint, albeit an intriguing one: ‘Let biologists and psychologists determine’ (O 139).

Apparently dismissing science, she may also be inviting us to take her at her word. On information pointedly omitted by the narrator, ‘biologists’ might have something to say. Jean-Jacques Mayoux thought as much, noting in a review of Orlando that ‘this change of sex’ and the fact that ‘sexes intermix’ reflect ‘the very opinions of contemporary biology’ (1930: 119). Mayoux says nothing else on the topic, but he is right. Beginning in the 1910s with Richard Goldschmidt's moth-breeding experiments, the study of sex determination would become by the early 1920s one of ‘the most active lines of work’ in genetics and sexual physiology (Gates 1921: 571). It would radically reimagine sex as fluid and variable, and though its findings were based mainly on insects and frogs, they inevitably implicated humans. ‘The fact of intersexuality’ in animals very different from us, argues Julian Huxley, ‘shows us that we may have to revise not only our moral judgments but our legal practice with regard to various abnormalities of sex in human beings’ (1922c: 241).