fuer Gynaekologie 1903) goes so far as to class the homosexual as “real pseudohermaphrodites,” exactly comparable to a man with a female breast or a woman with a beard, and proposes to term homosexuality “pseudohermaphroditus masculinus psychicus.”  This, however, is an unnecessary and scarcely satisfactory confusion.

To place the group of homosexual phenomena among other intermediate groups on the organic bisexual basis is a convenient classification.  It can scarcely be regarded as a complete explanation.  It is probable that we may ultimately find a more fundamental source of these various phenomena in the stimulating and inhibiting play of the internal secretions.[234] Our knowledge of the intimate association between the hormones and sexual phenomena is already sufficient to make such an explanation intelligible; the complex interaction of the glandular internal secretions and their liability to varying disturbance in balance may well suffice to account for the complexity of the phenomena.  It would harmonize with what we know of the occasional delayed manifestations of homosexuality, and would not clash with their congenital nature, for we know that a disordered state of the thymus, for instance, may be hereditary, and it is held that status lymphaticus may be either inborn or acquired.[235] Normal sexual characters seem to depend largely upon the due co-ordination of the internal secretions, and it is reasonable to suppose that sexual deviations depend upon their inco-ordination.  If a man is a man, and a woman a woman, because (in Blair Bell’s phrase) of the totality of their internal secretions, the intermediate stages between the man and the woman must be due to redistribution of those internal secretions.[236]

We know that various internal secretions possess an influential sexual effect.  Thus the atrophy of the thymus seems to be connected with sexual development at puberty; the thyroid reinforces the genital glands; adrenal overdevelopment can produce in a female the secondary characteristics of the male, as well as cause precocious development of maleness; etc.  “An alteration in the metabolism,” as F.H.A.  Marshall suggests, “even in comparatively late life, may initiate changes in the direction of the opposite sex.”  Metabolic chemical processes may thus be found to furnish a key to complex and subtle sexual variations, alike somatic and psychic, although we must still regard such processes as arising on an inborn predisposition.

Whatever its ultimate explanation, sexual inversion may thus fairly be considered a “sport,” or variation, one of those organic aberrations which we see throughout living nature, in plants and in animals.