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Just before graduating from Yale with a PhD in History (and a WGSS graduate certificate!), I started teaching at the University of Pennsylvania—which was a slightly unexpected order of operations, but a tenure-track job waits for no one, and bureaucracies don’t always have aligning calendars. At Penn, I’m an assistant professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science and the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. I do find myself sometimes still saying WGSS five years in because learning a new acronym is, it turns out, harder than one might think.
Regardless of the specific order of letters, though, most of my teaching has something to do with sex, gender, and sexuality in some way or another. One of my most frequent offerings is an undergraduate seminar called Queer Science, which I first developed and co-taught with Joanna Radin through Yale’s Associates in Teaching Program. In that course, we focus on what it might look like for science to take up queer approaches to knowledge production that question categories, denaturalize what is often assumed to be biologically innate, and foreground queer forms of kinship, reproduction, and thriving. Beyond Queer Science, I also teach courses like Trans Method, Queer Life in US History, Studying Sex, and Gender and Society, and I supervise dissertations on topics ranging from the history of sexual reproduction and diversity in genetics research to the construction of “technological kinship” in livestock breeding.
I spent several years post-Yale transforming my dissertation into a book, Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary, which just came out in February 2026 with Duke University Press. The book looks at how sex has functioned as a classification system not despite but because of multiple, often conflicting, versions of it existing at the same time, with the categories “male” and “female” persistently flexing to pull non-normative bodies back into them. It’s essentially a prehistory of cisness that shows the tremendous amount of work that goes into making it seem like most people just happen to have a gender identity that matches a binarily sexed body. I’m now working on two new projects: one investigates Cold War anxiety about reproduction and repopulation after an imagined nuclear disaster and how it re-biologized sex at the same moment that transsexuality was becoming a widely-known category, and another that traces the lesbian and trans feminist origins of theories of classification.
Beans Velocci
they/them
Assistant Professor
Department of History and Sociology of Science
Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies
University of Pennsylvania
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