Whatever Diderot’s actual proclivities, his overall philosophical orientation led him to reconsider both sexual norms and the immutability of gender categories. Some of this broad-minded stance may flow directly from his understanding of sexual anatomy. By the late 1760s, Diderot was not only convinced that the two sexes shared common anatomical structures in utero, but that the categories of gender themselves had also emerged from a biologically fluid past where, as he put it in D’Alembert’s Dream, “perhaps man is only a freakish form of woman, or woman a freakish form of
