Intersexes in the human species—­not only the extreme pathological cases represented by the so-called “hermaphrodites,” but also merely masculine women and effeminate men—­have been the subject of serious remarks as well as literary gibes from the earliest times.  The Greeks called these people urnings.  Schopenhauer was interested in the vast ancient literature and philosophy on this subject.  The 19th century produced a copious psychological treatment of warped or reversed sexual impulses by such men as Moll, Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis.  Otto Weiniger[10] collected a mass of this philosophy, literature, psychology, folklore and gossip, tied it together with such biological facts as were then known (1901) and wove around it a theory of sex attraction.[A] The same material was popularized by Leland[11], Carpenter[12] and W.L.  George[13] to support quite different views.

[Footnote A:  NOTE:  Weiniger thought he could pick, merely by observing physical type, people who would be sexually attracted to each other.  There is much ground for scepticism about this.  To begin with, the biological experiments indicate that intersexes are peculiarly likely to appear where two or more races are mixed.  So far, there is no exact knowledge about the amount or kind of sex difference in each race.  As Bateson remarks (Biol.  Fact & the Struct. of Society, p.13), one unversed in the breeds even of poultry would experience great difficulty and make many mistakes in sorting a miscellaneous group of cocks and hens into pairs according to breed.  If this is true in dealing with pure breeds, “in man, as individuals pure-bred in any respect are very rare, the operation would be far more difficult.”  In the human species sexual attraction also obviously depends upon many factors which are not purely biological; it is rather a complicated sentiment than an instinct.]

George’s statement that “there are no men and ... no women; there are only sexual majorities"[p.61, op. cit.] has been widely quoted.  The feminists, he adds, “base themselves on Weininger’s theory, according to which the male principle may be found in woman, and the female principle in man.”  Unfortunately, George does not make clear what he means by “principle,” so his theory, if he has one, is impossible to appraise in biological terms.  From the embryonic idea expressed above, he deduces a very positive social philosophy of sex.  The feminists, he says, “recognize no masculine or feminine ‘spheres’ and ... propose to identify absolutely the conditions of the sexes.”  So, while George seems to think much more highly of women than does Weininger, their philosophies come together, for quite different reasons, on the practical procedure of disregarding reproduction and letting the race go hang[10, p.345].  Weininger seems to recognize the dual basis for sex; George evidently does not quite follow him.  Both entirely misconceived the real issues involved, as well as the kind of evidence required to settle them, as we shall see later in discussing adaptation and specialization.