The distinct type to which the first assistant to the chief medical examiner of the city referred is the thymo-centric personality (status lymphaticus is another technical name for it), we have been considering.  The persistence of the thymus after adolescence makes for an arrest of masculinization or feminization, the end-point arrived at by the processes of puberty.  That is, a partial castration takes place.  Now, as the experiments of Steinach upon the transplantation of ovaries into males deprived of their testes and of testes into females deprived of their ovaries have demonstrated, the removal of the interstitial cells of one sex assists enormously in arousing the opposite sex traits that have been latent, homosexuality.  In a thymo-centric, tendencies to homosexuality and masochism appear.  And so all the remarkable after-effects of those processes that the Freudians have so lovingly traced:  the father complex in men, the inferiority complex, and the feminoid complex in general.

The feminoid complex introduces again the character of the functional hermaphrodite, the mixed male-female.  The sex index will certainly come in time as a measurement of sexuality.  But until then some more available classification of sex tendency is necessary.  Including sex intergrades, one may divide sex types into six classes:  male, male-female, male-female, female, female-male, and female-male.  The sex intergrades, the four hyphenated classes, nearly all have some degree of persistent thymus.  If its influence is partial, the emphasis is before the hyphen, upon the ostensible.  If its influence is unchecked, the emphasis is after the hyphen upon the apparently latent sex.  The sex difficulties produced in these people by the conflict between their conscious sex and their subconscious sex, the sex duel in the same mind, Siamese twins pulling in diametrically opposite directions, are comprehensible only from the viewpoint of the internal secretions.

Homosexuality, in one form or another, frank or concealed, haunts the thymo-centric and spoils his life.  The persistent thymus, like a vindictive Electra, stalks the footsteps of its victim, its possessor.  He wishes to live, according to society’s remorselessly rigid expectations, for virility and happiness.  But his thymus condition forces him also to live for femininity and misery.  That homosexuality is not purely a psychic matter, of complexes and introversion, as the newest psychology would have us believe, has been proved by observations of its development in animals with internal secretion disturbances, acquired or experimental.  Thus it has been recorded that a male dog showed a large goitrous swelling of the thyroid in the neck, with a rapid heart, staring eyes, the loss of flesh and fat and the nervousness of a hyperthyroid condition.  Therewith he became an absolute homosexual.  Observations on the primates along the same lines have been made.  In goitrous hyperthyroids thymus persistence is common.