edico-juristic, in Germany, by
writers like Casper-Liman and Krafft-Ebing, that sexual inversion is
more often than not innate. So far, without discussing the physiological
or metaphysical explanations of this phenomenon, without considering
whether Ulrichs is right in his theory of _anima muliebris inclusa in
corpore virili_, or whether heredity, insanity, and similar general
conditions are to be held responsible for the fact, it may be taken as
admitted on all sides that the sexual diathesis in question is in a very
large number of instances congenital. But Ulrichs seems to claim too
much for the position he has won. He ignores the frequency of acquired
habits. He shuts his eyes to the force of fashion and depravity. He
reckons men like Horace and Ovid and Catullus, among the ancients, who
were clearly indifferent in their tastes (as indifferent as the modern
Turks) to the account of Uranodionings. In one word, he is so
enthusiastic for his physiological theory that he overlooks all other
aspects of the question. Nevertheless, he has acquired the right to an
impartial hearing, while pleading in defence of those who are
acknowledged by all investigators of the problem to be the subjects of
an inborn misplacement of the sexual appetite.

Let us turn, then, to the consideration of his arguments in favour of
freeing Urnings from the terrible legal penalties to which they are at
present subject, and, if this were possible, from the no less terrible
social condemnation to which they are exposed by the repugnance they
engender in the normally constituted majority. Dealing with these
exceptions to the kindly race of men and women, these unfortunates who
have no family ties knotted by bonds by mutual love, no children to
expect, no reciprocity of passion to enjoy, mankind, says Ulrichs, has
hitherto acted just in the same way as a herd of deer acts when it
drives the sickly and the weakly out to die in solitude; burdened with
contumely, and cut off from common sympathy.

From the point of view of morality and law, he argues, it does not
signify whether we regard the sexual inversion of an Urning as morbid or
as natural. He has become what he is in the dawn and first emergence of
emotional existence. You may contend, that he derives perverted
instincts from his ancestry, that he is the subject of a psychical
disorder, that from the cradle he is predestined by atavism or disease
to misery. I maintain that he is one of nature's