Abstract
This article is a brief historical overview of the construction of the figure of the hermaphrodite which aims to analyze its permanence in present social imaginaries. Our analysis is connected with the socio‐historical construction of sex, emphasizing the elements used to classify human beings into the existing sexual categories. Through the presentation of real cases and their treatment, we aim to show how sexual classification has strongly relied on anatomy and how intersex/hermaphroditism has historically introduced uncertainty and unpredictability in the methods of classification.