According to the author’s theory,—whether any individual shall be a male or a female depends on the result of a battle in the embryo between the female corpuscles or germs of the egg and the male of the spermatozoa. From some cause, perhaps the relative state of vitality of the secretory sexual glands at the time of the formation of the particular egg and spermatozoon, either the female germs or the male germs happen to be the more vigorous, and determine the sex of the unborn. If the fœtus develops into a female, it is because the female germs have devoured the male. For some reason, in exceptional cases, the more vigorous set of cells have not succeeded in devouring the other set entirely, and both kinds coexist in different parts of the same individual throughout his existence. In a male there may be only a single patch of female tissue—that is, tissue dominated in its development by the presence of the female bacteria—about the cheeks and neck, rendering him beardless, but with masculine habits of mind and the male sexual instinct. To constitute a passive invert, the brain, the physical basis of the psychical nature, must be composed of female tissue, must be a “female brain.”
Female Brain in Male Body.
Can it be denied that the brain of a male is fundamentally different from that of a female, although in outward appearance they are practically alike? The psychical nature of a female is radically different from that of a male, consequently the fundamental nature of certain brain cells of the female must be as different from that of corresponding cells of the male as the psychical nature of a woman is different from that of a man, and as the corpus of a woman is different from that of a man. How can one explain why a six-year-old boy (the author) should class himself as a girl, give himself a girl’s name, fight against his parents’ course of bringing him up as a boy, and grieve because he could not be brought up as a girl, except on the assumption that the cells of his brain were identical with the cells of a girl’s brain and fundamentally different from those of a normal boy?
If a surgeon could interchange the brains of a boy and of a girl, your author believes that the boy would ever afterward feel himself to be a girl, and the girl feel herself to be a boy. But it would be nearer the truth to say that with the implanting of the brain of the opposite sex, the male and female souls were also transposed. We would have an instance of a male human being with a perfect female body except the brain—an artificial amazon. Similarly, a female human being with a perfect male body except the brain—an artificial androgyne. In the natural androgyne, the female brain was formed in the male corpus before birth. There are likely, as in the case of your author, to be other patches of female tissue in other parts of the corpus.
Oscar Wilde’s Life Story.
“Active inverts,” improperly so called, have been referred to as cases of “a female mind in a male body,” as in the Introduction to Eekhoud’s “Escal Vigor.” The subject of this novel, as well as Oscar Wilde, whose case evidently forms the theme of the book, were not such instances. Theirs were cases of innate and therefore irresponsible sexual perversion rather than of inversion. They were “urnings.” “Escal Vigor” is of value as portraying the development and inner life of the urning, while this autobiography deals with the passive invert, or “the invert” properly speaking. The urning or active pederast loves an adolescent as a normal man loves a woman, and desires active pædicatio or else mutual onanism. The passive invert loves the adolescent as a woman loves a man, and desires fellatio, or occasionally the part of the pathic in pædicatio.
While reading “Escal Vigor” many years ago, your author was convinced that the book was primarily written by Oscar Wilde and based on his own life experience. This suspicion is confirmed by the name of the book, the two words having the same length as those of the name of the individual; the second and third letters of the first name being the same in both, as well as the second letter of the surname; while the initial V is the French equivalent of the English W, the novel having been first published in French. I have myself built a pseudonym on my baptismal name in similar fashion. The suspicion is further confirmed by the rumor of 1918 that Wilde is still alive.
Inversion Is Not Sodomy.
There occur homosexual practices which are really due to moral depravity or to the absence of the opposite sex. This is the true sodomy, an entirely different phenomenon than is present in the case of the congenital invert and urning. Knowledge of the history of the particular individual will readily determine to which of the three categories he belongs.
The author’s criticism of Havelock Ellis’s theory ‘that a condition of diffused minor abnormality in physical structure, consisting in approach to the feminine type, is the basis of congenital inversion; that inversion is bound up with a modification of the secondary sexual characters’ is that in my own case the attraction toward the male sex was powerful as early as the age of three, when there is probably no difference between the physical type of the normal and of the inverted male. This indicates that there is no cause-and-effect relation between the feminine secondary sexual characters and the love for the male sex, but that they are twin effects of a common cause, namely, the presence in the male body of the particular kind of governing corpuscles or germs ordinarily found only in the protoplasm of females.