Intersex

“ But any doctor, really anxious to lead the querist not to feel himself solitary, or morally depraved because of his mysterious sexual nature, can give no better reply in most instances, than—"Friend, you are, what you are—an Uranian, one of the Intersex-race. You cannot be cured. ”

“ To the one extreme and perfect masculine sex, a man, and to the other extreme and perfect female sex, a woman, we will add at least two Intersexes. These Intersexes partake of the natures and temperaments and physiques of both the male and the female, now to one extent, now to another. Departing from the first sex a man, we establish a second and "intersexual" sex, known to European medico-psychologic literature as the Urning, or Uranian sex. ”

“ In brief, then, the quantitative theory of sex is merely the most reasonable explanation of the known fact that intersexes exist—that is, females with some male characteristics, or with all their characters more like the female type than the average, and vice versa. Laboratory biology has established the phenomena of intersexuality beyond question, and the word "inter-sex" has become a scientific term. ”

“ These two Intersexes named here as the Uranian and the Uraniad, the one partaking most of the outwardly and inwardly masculine yet not fully a man, the other leaning toward the typic feminine yet not fully woman, are each indisputably a blend of the two extreme sexes. Each is more or less indisputably entitled to recognition as to its individual rights; each exists now as ever in a most important proportion to the rest of mankind. ”

“ This is their master-separation, although other traits are more or less concurrent and logical therein. Such Intersexes express the half-steps, the between-beings. Their existence is as irrefutable as immemorial. For centuries, the world has narrowed-down mankind into two sexes. There are at least two more than our traditional anthropological spectrum has perceived and recognized; each of primary importance always. ”

“ The theory of these Intersexes is likely to be startling to the layman, as soon as he thinks of it otherwise than as a fantasy, and begins to perceive its practical bearings on the world's social systems. For, undeniably, by an unavoidable succession of its applications it has much in it revolutionary of social, moral and individual life. ”

“ Obvious is the danger to prescribe a marriage in the case of distinctly intersexual men and women. To too many medical men, similisexualism seems "wholly a pathologic affair," a disease, a "morbid" abnormalism. They do not accept, or admit, similisexualism as the eternal manifestation of any distinct—or indistinct—Intersexes. ”

“ The same conclusion might be arrived at theoretically on the grounds of the recent biological evidence of intersexuality discussed in Part I, which implies that there are no absolute degrees of maleness and femaleness. If there are no 100% males and females, it is obvious that no men and women will entirely conform to ideals of masculine and feminine perfection. ”

“ Any person whose sexual characteristics have been altered by surgical or medical treatment or by evolvement through natural development resulting in gender reassignment, or any person who is intersexed may apply to the Director-General of the National Department of Home Affairs for the alteration of the sex description on his or her birth register. ”

“ Obviously operations cannot be performed on all those with female-type bodies who do not bear children, to determine the primary sex, and conversely with men. This does, however, point the obvious question: Are not some we classify as men more male or masculine than others—some we classify as women more feminine than others? Bearing in mind the fact that the genetic basis for both sexes exists in each individual, are not some women more masculine than others, some men more feminine than others? ”

“ Pseudo-Hermaphrodites are humans possessing in part both the male and the female genitalia, or else organs so deformed that even sexologists are unable to determine the sex until puberty. In half such cases, the physician then pronounces the individual to belong to the sex other than that with which he or she has identified him or herself. As a rule, they subsequently live and clothe themselves per prescription. But some, accustomed to the dress and usages of their first sex, choose to identify themselves with it throughout life. ”

“ Nature, on the contrary, all the while, ever has been striving patiently, silently, to remind us that we have been too narrow; that what we call the exceptional, the abnormal, may be perfectly normal; mature to itself and entlited to its own independent place and recognition in anthropology and society. In defining sex for instance, Nature would nut permit us to forget, that the physique of the unborn child so embodies for many weeks the traits of two sexes that the skilled anatomist cannot tell us whether the foetus should have been born a boy or a girl. ”

“ If we examine the physical phenomenon of sex as it manifests itself in the human creature, we find, in the first stages of the individual’s existence, no difference discernible, by any means we have at present at our command, between those germs which are ultimately to become male or female. Later, in the foetal life, at birth, and through infancy though the organs of sex serve to distinguish the male from the female, there is in the general structure and working of the organism little or nothing to divide the sexes. ”

“ The female sex stands one step lower in the arrangement of nature than the male sex; the female sex is the object of a power of the male sex, and no other arrangement was possible if both sexes were to be connected. But at the same time both sexes, as moral beings, ought to be equal. To make this possible, a new faculty, utterly wanting in the male sex, had to be given to the female sex. This faculty is the form in which the sexual impulse appears to woman, whereas to man it appears in its true form. ”

“ Why have we set up masculinity and femininity as processes that have not perfectly logical and respectable inter-steps? We have established, we have decked out, to our own ideas, just two sexes. Where presently we are confronted by what appears an abnormality in their expression we have said that that expression is imperfect, and to be repudiated. The fact is that have we lacked charter-right, guidance and warrant for our arrogance. Generation after generation, we have gone on, judging humanity sexually without full initial authority. ”

“ Only when through a division of labour these elements became detached, and the special functions of each were confided to two distinct and separate individuals, did the independent history of the female and male sexes begin.
No fact is more patent, at the present time, than that sex constitutes the underlying principle throughout nature. Although it may not be said of the simplest forms of life that sexual difference has been established, yet we are assured that among the ciliated Infusorians “male and female nuclear elements have been distinguished.” ”

“ Hence in most cases the young of both sexes resemble each other; and the female somewhat resembles her young offspring throughout life. In almost every great class a few anomalous cases occur, where there has been an almost complete transposition of the characters proper to the two sexes; the females assuming characters which properly belong to the males. This surprising uniformity in the laws regulating the differences between the sexes in so many and such widely separated classes, is intelligible if we admit the action of one common cause, namely sexual selection. ”

“ In view of this fact, is it too much to raise the question whether or not sex in woman is designed to fulfill any other purpose than that of the reproduction of the race? True it is, that the only function of sex in all other females is merely that of producing offspring—of perpetuating its kind. Under no circumstances does it ever serve any other end, fulfill any other design. ”

“ A man does not object to being called “masculine,” nor a woman to being called “feminine.” Yet whatever is masculine or feminine is sexual. To be distinguished by femininity is to be distinguished by sex. To be over-feminine is to be over-sexed. To manifest in excess any of the distinctions of sex, primary or secondary, is to be over-sexed. Our hypothetical peacock, with his too large and splendid tail, would be over-sexed, and no offence to his moral character!
The primary sex-distinctions in our race as in others consist merely in the essential organs and functions of reproduction. ”

“ On the Relation between the Period of Development of a Character and its Transmission to one Sex or to both Sexes.—Why certain characters should be inherited by both sexes, and other characters by one sex alone, namely by that sex in which the character first appeared, is in most cases quite unknown. We cannot even conjecture why with certain sub-breeds of the pigeon, black striæ, though transmitted through the female, should be developed in the male alone, whilst every other character is equally transferred to both sexes. ”

“ In a sense, then, we may say that the so-called Intermediate Sex is older and nearer to nature than the differentiated male and female sexes. It may be considered a modern holdover, or vestige, of the bisexual character typical of primitive beings and organisms. But when found in the genus homo when not debauched by a vicious environment or distorted by an unfavorable heredity—it may, as we have seen, reach the highest stage of human fruition. ”

“ From the ardour of the male throughout the animal kingdom, he is generally willing to accept any female; and it is the female which usually exerts a choice. Hence if sexual selection has here acted, the male, when the sexes differ, ought to be the most brilliantly coloured; and this undoubtedly is the ordinary rule. When the sexes are brilliantly coloured and resemble each other, the characters acquired by the males appear to have been transmitted to both sexes. But will this explanation of the similarity and dissimilarity in colour between the sexes suffice? ”

“ But—and here is the great difficulty—how can the changed male have given his lost organs to his sex, and the female have transmitted her original but now modified peculiarities to the workers; especially as neuters do not propagate, and hence can not transmit their characters to progeny? Another law solves a portion of the difficulty: peculiarities acquired at any period of life are apt to appear in the same sex at the same time of life. ”

“ The problem of the bisexual girl-boy or androgyne has been presented for the learned professions in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Riddle of the Underworld. But to accomplish my three aims, it is necessary that the general reader have instilled into his mind that sexual intermediates are not to blame for their cross-sex idiosyncrasies. Such knowledge could not besmirch the soul of the general reader, but only benefit him morally. ”

“ Has woman the same rights in the state which man has? This question may appear ridiculous to many. For if the only ground of all legal rights is reason and freedom, how can a distinction exist between two sexes which possess both the same reason and the same freedom?
Nevertheless, it seems that, so long as men have lived, this has been differently held, and the female sex seems not to have been placed on a par with the male sex in the exercise of its rights. Such a universal sentiment must have a ground, to discover which was never a more urgent problem than in our days. ”

“ We must thus dismiss some popular notions of what constitutes sexual manhood and womanhood, and their indispensable system of attributes, as being other than two widely-parted extremes. Nature constantly demands of us why we have endowed our ideals of the two sexes with only such or such qualities; by what right we have gone on insisting that each specimen of sex in humanity must conform absolutely to two theories, must follow out two programmes only, or else be thought amiss, imperfect and degenerate. ”

“ For this science teaches us that the endowment of a being with either male or female organs, presupposes the existence of the other sex; and that either sex, without the other would be a ludicrous anomaly, and a ludicrous distortion of nature unparalleled in the history of science. As sexual organs create an imperious desire for the other sex, no male or female could long enjoy full happiness in the absence of the other party. ”

“ The organic sex of unborn infants we know as not determined for a considerable period of gestation. Nature herself seems to hesitate, to postpone. The boy comes into the world not obviously affected in his sex as to any virile trait, born with a boy's body and a boy's mind; but unluckily for him endowed with the sexual impulses of a girl. Or the girl, blamelessly feminine in her physique, must go through life yearning for sexual union with a woman. ”

“ Whatever else stops, the woman must go on reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vital condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind. The American always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history mentioned hardly the name of a woman, while English history handled them as timidly as though they were a new and undescribed species; but if the problem of inertia summed up the difficulties of the race question, it involved that of sex far more deeply, and to Americans vitally. ”

“ I append them here because tending to show that the sparser the population of a district, the greater the repugnance of civilized young roues to androgynism and the rarer is the latter phenomenon per thousand males. In other words: My conclusion from extensive travel and intimate mingling, as an ultra-androgyne, with native adolescent roues in every corner of the United States and Europe is that among civilized nations, the frequency of male bisexuals per thousand inhabitants and their tolerance by the full-fledged are in general in direct proportion to the density of population. ”