The Intermediate Sex
Medical, psychological, and legal publications dealing with sex not infrequently featured historical details of what was characterized as sexual and gender irregularity over the centuries or of the supposed prevalence of homosexuality among noted figures of the past. One example is Human Sexuality: A Medico-Literary Treatise on the History and Pathology of the Sex Instinct for the Use of Physicians and Jurists (1912) by J. Richardson Parke (1858–1938), a physician of dubious background whose practice was located near Washington Square Park in Philadelphia.
Borrowing from earlier English, French, and German writers, his comments on the past range from “Sexual Depravity in Early Rome” through “Sexual Inversion Among Artists” to the “‘Freda Ward’ Case” (a lesbian murder case in Memphis, twenty years before the book was published). Obscenity laws putatively restricted the sale of such publications to the professional class, yet as Parke acknowledges in his preface, they nonetheless found their way into the hands of avid laypeople. Parke himself had been arrested in 1909 on a complaint of obscenity for sending an earlier edition of Human Sexuality through the mail, but no charges were brought.
The Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) and The Female-Impersonators (1922), that look back to queer life in New York City in the 1890s, both written by the pseudonymous Earl Lind (ca. 1874–?), also known as Ralph Werther and Jennie June, a feminine-identified man whom some might now see as a precursor to contemporary transwomen.
In "The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women", Edward Carpenter wrote in 1908: "It is recognised that anyhow the number of persons occupying an intermediate position between the two sexes is very great, that they play a considerable part in general society, and that they necessarily present and embody many problems which, both for their own sakes and that of society, demand solution.... That there are distinctions and gradations of Soul-material in relation to Sex — that the inner psychical affections and affinities shade off and graduate, in a vast number of instances, most subtly from male to female, and not always in obvious correspondence with the outer bodily sex — is a thing evident enough to anyone who considers the subject; nor could any good purpose well be served by ignoring this fact — even if it were possible to do so. It is easy of course (as some do) to classify all these mixed or intermediate types as bad. It is also easy (as some do) to argue that just because they combine opposite qualities they are likely to be good and valuable. But the subtleties and complexities of Nature cannot be despatched in this off-hand manner."
Published by specialized small presses, these books received limited circulation, yet knowledge of their existence reached those on the lookout for such titles. Long after publication, new readers continued discovering them through copies passed hand to hand or sold in shadowy zones of the used book market.
The British sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote in Sexual Inversion "Suppose that eating and drinking were never spoken of openly, save in veiled or poetic language, and that no one ever ate food publicly, because it was considered immoral and immodest to reveal the mysteries of this natural function. We know what would occur. A considerable proportion of the community, more especially the more youthful members, possessed by an instinctive and legitimate curiosity, would concentrate their thoughts on the subject. They would have so many problems to puzzle over: How often ought I to eat? What ought I to eat? Is it wrong to eat fruit, which I like? Ought I to eat grass, which I don't like? Instinct notwithstanding, we may be quite sure that only a small minority would succeed in eating reasonably and wholesomely. The sexual secrecy of life is even more disastrous than such a nutritive secrecy would be...
"It cannot be positively affirmed of all these persons that they were born inverted, but in most the inverted tendency seems to be instinctive, and appears at a somewhat early age. In any case, however, it must be realised that in this volume we are not dealing with subjects belonging to the lunatic asylum or the prison. We are concerned with individuals who live in freedom, some of them suffering intensely from their abnormal organisation, but otherwise ordinary members of society....
The shift from criminal acts to group identity was not immediate or even; as the twentieth century progressed a man engaged in genital sexual relations with another man might still be arrested for sodomy, but was now also likely to be defined by medical professionals as a “sexual invert.” This early twentieth-century category referenced not just the type of sexual behavior in which an individual was engaged, but also more broadly referenced the type of person who engaged in such behavior. This type was linked by sexologists to effeminacy in men and mannishness in women.
For Havelock Ellis and others this phenomenon was worthy of sympathy — but sexual inversion transposed the issue of same-sex desire into one of gendered physical attributes, behaviors, and forms of dress. Thus many sexologists collapsed into one category a range of sexual orientations that would later be distinguished as bisexuality, transgender, and/or same-sex sexuality.
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