A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and JuristsSymonds, John Addington
Philosophy
A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists
Symonds, John Addington
Homosexuality
The line of division between the sexes, even in adult life, is a subtle
one; and the physical structure of men and women yields indubitable
signs of their emergence from a common ground-stuff. Perfect men have
rudimentary breasts. Perfect women carry a rudimentary penis in their
clitoris. The raphé of the scrotum shows where the aperture, common at
first to masculine and feminine beings, but afterwards only retained in
the female vulva, was closed up to form a male. Other anatomical details
of the same sort might be adduced. But these will suffice to make
thinking persons reflect upon the mysterious dubiety of what we call
sex. That gradual development, which ends in normal differentiation,
goes on very slowly. It is only at the age of puberty that a boy
distinguishes himself abruptly from a girl, by changing his voice and
growing hair on parts of the body where it is not usually found in
women. This being so, it is surely not surprising that the sexual
appetite should sometimes fail to be normally determined, or in other
words should be inverted.
Ulrichs maintains that the body of an Urning is masculine, his soul
feminine, so far as sex is concerned. Accordingly, though physically
unfitted for coition with men, he is imperatively drawn towards them by
a natural impulse. Opponents meet him with this objection: "Your
position is untenable. Body and soul constitute one inseparable entity."
So they do, replies Ulrichs; but the way in which these factors of the
person are combined in human beings differs extremely, as I can prove by
indisputable facts. The body of a male is visible to the eyes, is
mensurable and ponderable, is clearly marked in its specific organs. But
what we call his soul--his passions, inclinations, sensibilities,
emotional characteristics, sexual desires--eludes the observation of the
senses. This second factor, like the first, existed in the undetermined
stages of the fœtus. And when I find that the soul, this element of
instinct and emotion and desire existing in a male, had been directed
in its sexual appetite from earliest boyhood towards persons of the male
sex, I have the right to qualify it with the attribute of femininity.
You assume that soul-sex is indissolubly connected and inevitably
derived from body-sex. The facts contradict you, as I can prove by
referring to the veracious autobiographies of Urnings and to known
phenomena regarding them.
Such is the theory of Ulrichs; and though we may not incline to his
peculiar mode of explaining the want of harmony between sexual organs
and sexual appetite in Urnings, there can be no doubt that in some way
or other their eccentric diathesis must be referred to the obscure
process of sexual differentiation.[58] Perhaps he antedates the moment
at which the aberration sometimes takes its origin, not accounting
sufficiently for imperative impressions made on the imagination or the
senses of boys during the years which precede puberty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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