Third gender

“ It is the proper function of woman to reverse all this—to receive, respond, provoke passion, accept, exude, gestate, and to have all the sensations proper thereto. But thousands have the characteristics of their proper sex, physiologically, with their normal sensations, impellant or nervo-vital action, and instead have all the latter characteristics of the reverse gender. This abnormal state, so very common, results from their mothers wishing and hoping that the unborn may be of one sex, while nature determines to, and does produce its opposite; wherefore such girls will love like a man ”

“ Intellectually the third sex is superior to the others. It is less emotional, more cool, dispassionate, patient and rational. It is more gentle and sympathetic, yet more firm in its conclusions and persistent in its purposes. In size it is between the other sexes the male being the largest—as with you—and from the same cause, polygamy, which as in your case, was practiced by our ancestors. But our sex is physically finer, stronger, more wiry and tough, more skillful in all the arts of life and twenty-five per cent longer lived than the others. ”

“ Gender roles are constantly redefined by tectonic shifts in the definition and functioning of basic social units, such as the nuclear family and the workplace. The cross-fertilization of gender-related cultural memes renders "masculinity" and "femininity" fluid concepts.
One's sex equals one's bodily equipment, an objective, finite, and, usually, immutable inventory. But our endowments can be put to many uses, in different cognitive and affective contexts, and subject to varying exegetic frameworks. As opposed to "sex" - "gender" is, therefore, a socio-cultural narrative. ”

“ The question, whether the female sex has really a claim to all the rights of men and of citizens which belong to the male sex, could be raised only by persons who doubt whether women are complete human beings. ”

“ I have presupposed, as it will be seen, that a woman will write only for her sex, and only for the purpose of being useful and to alleviate a discovered need of her sex; but on no account for our sex, or from motives of vanity or ambition. ”

“ From available facts relative to the development of early mankind, it is certain that it must have required centuries upon centuries of time to subjugate women and bring them into harmonious relations with men while occupying a position of sexual slavery; first, physical force, second, dependence, and third the substitution of masculine opinions for the instincts and ideas which are peculiar to the female constitution. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why not make laws and make them apply to the human being, leaving the sex of that human being out of the question? It is the special, restrictive, unnatural sex provisions in the laws and in the conditions of life that are objected to. No woman objects to nature's decree that she is a potential mother any more than men object to her decree that they are potential fathers. ”

“ Like an individual's concept of his or her sex role, gender identity develops by means of parental example, social reinforcement, and language. Parents teach sex-appropriate behavior to their children from an early age, and this behavior is reinforced as the child grows older and enters a wider social world. ”

“ One presumed male out of every three hundred belongs to the third sex, strictly speaking. That is, the ultra-androgynes—the pseudo-men who possess only undersized and non-functional male pudenda, whose body otherwise tends toward feminesqueness, and whose psyche, predilections, tastes, gestures, and postures remind one of a female.
The third sex is a commonplace topic in the Underworld, which comprises about one-tenth the population of "Christian" lands. The Underworlders, however, generally fail to understand the cause of the effeminacy. ”

“ Yet those who maintain that distinction of intelligence, etc., between the sexes are traceable to external conditions affecting one sex only and inherited through that sex alone, cannot evade the above assumption. ”

“ All the facts which have been observed relative to the acquirement of the social instincts and the moral sense prove them to have originated in the female constitution, and as progress is not possible without these characters, it is not difficult to determine within which of the sexes the progressive principle first arose. Even courage, perseverance, and energy, characters which are denominated as thoroughly masculine, since they are the result of Sexual Selection, have been and still are largely dependent on the will or choice of the female. ”

“ Since we first began to force upon our girl baby's astonished and resisting brain the fact that she was a girl; since we curbed her liberty by clothing and ornament calculated only to emphasise the fact of sex, and by restrictions of decorum based upon the same precocious distinction, we have never relaxed the pressure. As if we feared that there might be some mistake, that she was not really a girl but would grow up a boy if we looked the other way, we diligently strove to enforce and increase her femininity by every possible means. ”

“ Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. ”

“ The woman knew that she had done well because she had come to understand that, while life is placed peculiarly in the care and keeping of her sex, her sex has been endowed, for the protection, perfection, and perpetuation of Life, with peculiar instincts. She had come to understand that, while woman has been made the giver and guardian of Life, she, for that reason, is subject to laws that are not to be broken save with immeasurable loss to the race. To her sex is given, by Life itself, the divine right of selection that the future of the race may be assured. ”

“ Girls and boys, in short, would play harmlessly together, if the distinction of sex was not inculcated long before nature makes any difference.—I will go further, and affirm, as an indisputable fact, that most of the women, in the circle of my observation, who have acted like rational creatures, or shewn any vigour of intellect, have accidentally been allowed to run wild—as some of the elegant formers of the fair sex would insinuate. ”

“ For such women it was indeed a blessed day when the word that was to deliver them from bondage and to open to them paths of public usefulness was first spoken by the pioneers of feminism, throwing open to the female sex the many professions for which they are as fit, or even fitter—in spite of the equality theory—than men! ”

“ In order to guard our young friends against the false reasonings, and equally false conclusions, of these advocates of the equality of the sexes, we will, in as plain and comprehensive a way as possible, set forth what is the true relation of one sex to the other; and in doing this we must explain the radical difference. As to equality in itself, this, no doubt, exists ”

“ I regard sex as the central problem of life. And now that the problem of religion has practically been settled, and that the problem of labor has at least been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex—with the racial questions that rest on it—stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution. Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.—So, at least, it seems to me. ”

“ The sex distinction; family institution; marriage in the mores. The division of the human race into two sexes is the most important of all anthropological facts. The sexes differ so much in structure and function, and consequently in traits of feeling and character, that their interests are antagonistic. At the same time they are, in regard to reproduction, complementary. There is nothing in the sex relation, or in procreation, to bring about any continuing relation between a man and a woman. It is the care and education of children which first calls for such a continuing relation. ”

“ So Nature created them, female and male created she them. To change the metaphor, we have the woman and the man=the unit—the race. While there is no fixing of the precise nature of this constitutional difference between the two sexes, we may yet, broadly speaking, reach the truth. The female, as the giver and keeper of life, is relatively more constructive, relatively less disruptive than the male. It is here, I believe, we touch the spring of those sex differences, which do exist, in spite of all efforts to explain them away between the woman and the man. ”

“ Hundreds of women must be interrogated, observed and reported upon—and then what? Shall we know the answer to our problem? Certainly not. In each case we must ask: Is this difference we have found between the sexes a natural inborn quality of woman, whether it be physical or psychical, that must be regarded as a right and unalterable part of her woman character, or is it an acquired, and therefore changeable, modification that has been superimposed upon her through the artificial sexual, social and economic circumstances of her environment? ”

“ Now, suppose a difference in the physical strength of the sexes to have become well established through this process in prehistoric times, before the dawn of civilization, the rest of the story follows very simply. The now confessedly dominant sex would, of course, seek to retain and increase its domination and the now fully subordinated sex would in time come to regard the inferiority to which it was born as natural, inevitable, and Heaven-ordained. ”

“ Under the latter condition, the youth associates the mother with sex domination and personal power—it is a woman-dominated world. Consequently there is also present the attitude, either of wishing to be a woman and rule, or of fleeing from woman when she clashes with his will to power as man. ”

“ The system of all the conditions for the generation of a body of the same species had to be completely united somewhere, and, when put in motion, to develop itself after its own laws. The sex which contains these complete conditions is called throughout all nature the female sex. ”

“ The sex relations of women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, as daughters, remain untouched, certainly unimpaired, by the demand to extend beyond these. What is impaired is not the sex relation, nor sex condition, but the social disabilities, the personal and social subordination, the condition of political non-existence, which have been foisted upon that sex condition. ”

“ But on the side of the sex we might expect to find the female disposition setting the standards of morality, since reproduction is even a greater part of her nature than of man's. On the contrary, however, we find the male standpoint carried over and applied to the reproductive process, and the regulation of sex practices transpiring on the basis of force. In the earliest period of society, under the maternal system, the woman had her own will more with her person ”

“ Now I believe it will be impossible for woman to fill the station assigned her by God, until her brethren mingle with her as an equal, as a moral being; and lose, in the dignity of her immortal nature, and in the fact of her bearing like himself the image and superscription of her God, the idea of her being a female. ”

“ Hence, the female sex is either not rational even in its tendencies, which contradicts our presupposition that all men should be rational, or this tendency can not be developed in that sex in consequence of its peculiar nature, which is a self-contradiction, since it assumes a tendency in nature which nature does not accept; or, finally, that sex can never propose to itself the satisfaction of its sexual impulse as its end. ”

“ Those who regard women from the all-human standpoint, holding the functions of sex to be only a passing incident in the great scheme of life, will be inclined to take the former view; those, on the other hand, who believe that a woman's life derives its colour from considerations of sex which refuse to be ignored, may well wonder where a rigorous application of perfect equality will land us in the end. ”

“ But beyond this it is important, and especially perhaps, as things stand now, for girls—that each youth or girl should personally see enough of the other sex at an early period to be able to form some kind of judgment of his or her relation to that sex and to sex-matters generally. It is monstrous that the first case of sex-glamor—the true nature of which would be exposed by a little experience—should, perhaps for two people, decide the destinies of a life-time. ”

“ Practically it is all right, but medico-legally it is wrong, to make the genitals the universal criterion in the determination of sex. Medico-legally, sex should be determined by the psychical constitution rather than by the physical form. There are thousands of physical females who feel themselves to be men and have the mental traits of men, and there are thousands of physical males who feel themselves to be women and have the mental traits of a woman. Should any blame be attached to such individuals when they conduct themselves according to their psychical sex? ”