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 foetus. 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.
However this may be, the tendency to such inversion is certainly inborn
in an extremely large percentage of cases. That can be demonstrated from
the reports of persons whose instincts were directed to the male before
they knew what sex meant. It is worth extractin
|