sports, a creature
healthy and well organised, evolved in her superb indifference to
aberrations from the normal type. We need not quarrel over our
solutions of the problem. The fact that he is there, among us, and that
he constitutes an ever-present factor in our social system, has to be
faced. How are we to deal with him? Has society the right to punish
individuals sent into the world with homosexual instincts? Putting the
question at its lowest point, admitting that these persons are the
victims of congenital morbidity, ought they to be treated as criminals?
It is established that their appetites, being innate, are _to them_ at
least natural and undepraved; the common appetites, being excluded from
their sexual scheme, are _to them_ unnatural and abhorrent. Ought not
such beings, instead of being hunted down and persecuted by legal
bloodhounds, to be regarded with pitying solicitude as among the most
unfortunate of human beings, doomed as they are to inextinguishable
longings and life-long deprivation of that which is the chief prize of
man's existence on this planet, a reciprocated love? As your laws at
present stand, you include all cases of sexual inversion under the one
domination of crime. You make exceptions in some special instances, and
treat the men involved as lunatics. But the Urning is neither criminal
nor insane. He is only less fortunate than you are, through an accident
of birth, which is at present obscure to our imperfect science of sexual
determination.

So far Ulrichs is justified in his pleading. When it has been admitted
that sexual inversion is usually a fact of congenital diathesis, the
criminal law stands in no logical relation to the phenomenon. It is
monstrous to punish people as wilfully wicked because, having been born
with the same organs and the same appetites as their neighbours, they
are doomed to suffer under the frightful disability of not being able to
use their organs or to gratify their appetites in the ordinary way.

But here arises a difficulty, which cannot be ignored, since upon it is
based the only valid excuse for the position taken up by society in
dealing with this matter. Not all men and women possessed by abnormal
sexual desires can claim that these are innate. It is certain that the
habits of sodomy are frequently acquired under conditions of exclusion
from the company of persons of the other sex--as in public schools,
barracks, prisons, convents, ships. In some cases