Martha Pedersen (189? - ?) office worker

In an article for the Ugeskrift for Læger in 1920, Knud Sand (1887-1968), a Danish trainee surgeon, a follower of Vienna’s Eugene Steinach, who had like Steinach transplanted sex glands in rats, guinea pigs, and chickens, asserted that "we are approaching a solution to the question regarding the biological basis of homosexuality”. In 1921, in the popular science journal Naturens Verden, Sand explained that modern research into sex hormones was in the process of unraveling the enigmatic physiology of sex and sexuality. He argued that this shed new light on "the sexually abnormal"—individuals who had previously constituted an innocent "pariah caste within society". Sand’s thesis is that congenital disturbances in sex hormone production can lead to phenomena as diverse as hermaphroditism and homosexuality;

In October 1921 an office worker in her early thirties was admitted to the Kommunehospitalet in Copenhagen. We do not know her name, but she has been given the above pseudonym for reference.

She had been arrested for being in women’s clothes in public, and had an appointment in the psychiatric department.  She was determined to ask for an operation to make her the woman that she should be, or at least a medical certificate to avoid future problems with the police.

She met with Knud Sand. Sand was eager to examine her. Could her self-image and desire to become a woman have biological explanations? He made a biopsy of her testes, but it came out as normal. He wanted to look inside her body, to inspect the organs from the inside. Submitting to general anesthesia, she agreed to undergo such an examination on one condition: Sand must promise not to remove any female parts that might be discovered in the course of the procedure.

He failed to find a biological explanation. He diagnosed her as a transvestite, and wrote to the police that her ‘abnormality’ was probably inborn, and recommended that she be allowed to take a female name, and to appear in public as a woman. Her “low sex drive and calm and peaceful character” meant that she posed a minimal risk to society.

Sand declined to operate on her to make her more feminine, and told her that he was not allowed to do so. In subsequent years she applied again and again to have such an operation but she was always denied it. 

In 1925 Knud Sand was appointed Professor of Forensic Medicine. 

In 1928 Sand sent a written request that she act as a living case of transvestism for a lecture that he was giving for the Medico-Legal Council. She took umbridge at this and broke off contact.

In 1929 Sand was one the principal architects behind the Danish Sterilization Act of that year. In addition to sterilization supposedly justified by eugenics, this Act permitted the castration of (potential) sex offenders—and, from 1935 onwards, also of individuals experiencing "mental distress" or "social deterioration" attributed to the intensity or direction of their sexual drive. Approximately one thousand men (and about ten women) underwent legal castration up until the late 1960s, when the surgical practice was abandoned.

Sand was knighted in 1932, and became a Knight Commander in 1942.

• Christian Graugaard, Professor Sands høns—om sexualbiologi i mellemkrigstidens Danmark. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen, 1997: 60-6.
• Christian Graugaard. ” Knud Sand og seksualitetens gåder”. Videnskab og Praksis, 27 August 2007. Online.
• Ketil Slagstad. Standardizing Sex: A History of Trans Medicine. The University of Chicago Press, 2025:1, 7-8, 217, 233.

DA.Wikipedia(Knud Sand)