THE SEX GLAND CENTERED OR GONADO-CENTRIC PERSONALITIES

(The Eunuchoid Personality)

Among the individuals whose personality is dominated by their sex glands the physiognomy, physique and life reactions are so distinctive that no better examples exist of our main thesis:  that the whole life of man is controlled primarily by his internal secretions.  These gonado-centric types are not all necessarily sex gland deficient, as the term eunuchoid implies.  They may be rather gonad unstable with a corresponding instability of the entire endocrine system.

About the face of the eunuchoid the striking feature is the incomplete, irregular, or absent hair development.  Below thirty it is chubby and ruddy, and rather childish in its texture; after thirty, there is an effect of premature senility:  the skin is yellowish, leathery, and wrinkled as the faces of old women are wrinkled:  the upper lip is traversed by vertical wrinkles, and wrinkles come around corners of the mouth.  The expression is juvenile, effeminate or plaintive.

Invariably the voice is higher pitched than the usual masculine tones.  It may be gentle and subdued, like a genteel female’s, or strident and rasping.  Occasionally it is a pleasant high tenor.  The Adam’s apple, poetic popular name for the thyroid cartilage, is never prominent, because it is not ossified, as it should be in the normal male.

Tall and slender, or generally undersized, the muscles are soft and flabby as a woman’s.  The hands and feet are small and gracile typically.  Viewed in profile, the lines of the body are feminine.  The breasts may reach almost the size of the female’s and there may be a well-marked area of pigmentation around the nipple.  The hair growth under the shoulders and on the lower abdomen tends to be scanty and to approximate the opposite sex in quality and distribution, as do the reproductive organs themselves.

These traits of physiognomy and physique indicate functional hermaphroditism in the underlying feminoid constitution.  The feminoid constitution appears again in the supposedly masculine.  The feminoid constitution should not be confused with the infantiloid constitution.  The former, the gonado-centric personality, is a digression of growth, a deviated evolution of the individual because of the conflicting forces, some masculine and some feminine, in his make-up.  The infantiloid constitution is one of arrested development, and may center around the arrested function in childhood or adolescence of any one or a number of endocrine glands.  Yet the two may resemble one another pretty closely, at times.  A cretin imitates the extreme grade of infantiloid constitution.  The infantiloid is a sort of enlarged and lengthened child.  The feminoid is ostensibly a man, with a good deal of woman in him.  The infantiloid is a quite general type, but of course when typical is a freak, recognized and treated as such.  How far the eunuchoid may deviate from the normal is suggested by the following description of one.