For harmony of life and temperament the body should be the perfect instrument and expression of the spirit.  When you have the temperament of one sex in the body of another, this cannot be.  There is at once a disharmony, a dislocation, a disorder—­in fact, a less perfect not a more perfect type.  Humanity does, I believe, progress towards a fuller element of the woman in the man, the man in the woman, and the best we have produced so far confirm the truth of this.  But it is not an advance to produce a type in which the temperament and the body are at odds.  This is not progress but perversion.

It is the same consciousness of dislocation which makes us condemn homosexual practices.  Here it is a dislocation between the means and the end.  The instinct of sex, to whatever use it may have been put, is fundamentally the creative instinct.  It is not by an accident, it is not as a side-issue, that it is through sexual attraction that children are born.  And however sublimated, however enriched, restrained and conditioned, the creative power of physical passion remains at once its justification and its consecration.  To use it in a relationship which must for ever be barren is “unnatural” and in the deepest sense immoral.  It is not easy to define “immorality,” because morality is one of the fundamentals which defy definition; but though it is not easy to define, it is not hard to recognize.  All the world knows that it is immoral to prostitute the creative power of genius to mere commercialism, for money or for fame.  No one can draw a hard and fast line.  No one will quarrel with a great artist because he lives by his art, or because he will sometimes turn aside to amuse himself, his public, or his friends.  Michaelangelo is not blamed because, one winter’s afternoon, he made a snow-statue for Lorenzo de Medici!  Yet all will admit that merely to amuse, merely to make money, merely to gain popularity is a prostitution of genius.  Why?  Because it is to put to another than its real purpose the creative power of a great artist.

In the same way, to use the power of another great creative impulse—­that of sex—­in a way which divorces it wholly from its end—­creation on the physical as well as the spiritual plane—­is immoral because it is “unnatural.”  Again and again it will be found to lead to a violent reaction of feeling—­a repulsion which is as intense and violent as the devotion which was its prelude.

What then should those do who have this temperament?  No one, perhaps, can wisely counsel them but themselves.  They alone can find out the way by which the disharmony of their being can be transcended.  That it can be so I am persuaded.  That modern psychology has already made strides in the knowledge of this problem we all know.  What is due to arrested development or to repression can be set right or liberated:  what is temperamental transmuted.  But I appeal to those who know this, but who have suffered and