merely in order to secure his sister’s companionship.  She was able to endure and even enjoy intercourse by imagining that her husband, who resembled his sister, was another sister.  Liking and esteem for the husband gradually increased and after the sister died a child was born who much resembled her; “the wife’s esteem passed through love of the sister to intense natural love of the daughter, as resembling the sister; through this to normal love of the husband as the father and brother.”  The final result may have been satisfactory, but this train of circumstances could not have been calculated beforehand.  Moll is also opposed, on the whole (e.g., Deutsche medicinische Presse, No. 6, 1902), to marriage and procreation by inverts.

[259] Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitaet, ch. xxi.  It might seem on theoretical grounds that the marriage of a homosexual man with a homosexual woman might turn out well.  Hirschfeld, however, states that he knows of 14 such marriages, and the theoretical expectation has not been justified; 3 of the cases speedily terminated in divorce, 4 of the couples lived separately, and all but 2 of the remaining couples regretted the step they had taken.  I may add that in such a case even the expectation of happiness scarcely seems reasonable, since neither of the parties can feel a true mating impulse toward the other.

[260] Hirschfeld also notes (Die Homosexualitaet, p. 95) that women often instinctively feel that there is something wrong in the love of their inverted husbands who may perhaps succeed in copulating, but betray their deepest feelings by a repugnance to touch the sexual parts with the hand.  The homosexual woman, also, as Hirschfeld elsewhere points out with cases in illustration (p. 84), may suffer seriously through being subjected to normal sexual relationships.

[261] Fere reports the case of an invert of great intellectual ability who had never had any sexual relationships, and was not averse from a chaste life; he was urged by his doctor to acquire the power of normal intercourse and to marry, on the ground that his perversion was merely a perversion of the imagination.  He did so, and, though he married a perfectly strong and healthy woman, and was himself healthy, except in so far as his perversion was concerned, the offspring turned out disastrously.  The eldest child was an epileptic, almost an imbecile, and with strongly marked homosexual impulses; the second and third children were absolute idiots; the youngest died of convulsions in infancy (Fere, L’Instinct Sexuel, p. 269 et seq.) No doubt this is not an average case, but the numerous examples of the offspring of similar marriages brought forward by Hirschfeld (op. cit., p. 391) scarcely present a much better result.