There is, however, also the possibility of difference in the quality
of gonad secretion, and of recent years Steinach and his followers
have been claiming that this may be at the bottom of many cases of
so-called “perversion of sexual instinct.” The latest claim of this
school is that homosexual men may be rendered heterosexual in instinct
by removal of their testes and implantation of a testis from a sexually
normal person--from a man, for example, who is being operated on for
cryptorchidism. It is frankly impossible as yet to say whether their
conclusions are well founded: a very much larger series of cases
will be necessary, and the possibility of suggestion’s action must
be eliminated. It is well to remember, however, that there is no
theoretical objection to the possibility. We know that in various
lower animals, such as moths and flies, the balance between the
male- and female-determining factors in the chromosomes may be altered
in certain crosses, and that this altered balance in the constitution
is reflected in some cases in a state permanently intermediate
between male and female, in others by a reversal of sex at some point
during development. For various reasons we should not usually expect
reversal in mammals; but if such abnormal balance should exist in the
constitution, as it well might, we should expect a gonad secreting an
abnormal, intermediate secretion. This we might also expect as the
result of certain accidents of embryonic life, as actually happens in
the abnormal female cattle known to farmers as free-martins. These
animals are always born co-twin to a male, and their abnormality is due
to the blood-systems of the embryonic membranes of the twins having
fused, so that the secretion of the developing male’s gonad acts upon
the developing female.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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