Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

HOMOSEXUALITYthough I regard inversion as frequently in close relationto minor neurotic conditions. We may agree with Hirschfeld(who finds hereditary taint in not more than 25 percent inverts) that even if there is a neuropathic basis ininversion the morbid element is usuallyWe small.are thus brought to what may be regarded as thefundamental basis in biological constitution on which,when we go outside the psychological field, homosexualitycan be said to rest. It may seem easy to say that there aretwo definitely separated distinct and immutable sexes, themale that bears the sperm-cell and the female that bearsthe ovum or egg. That statement has, however, long ceasedto be, biologically, strictly correct. We may not knowexactly what sex is; but we do know that it is mutable,with the possibility of one sex being changed into theother sex, that its frontiers are often uncertain, and thatthere are many stages between a complete male and acomplete female. In some forms of animal life, indeed,it is not easy to distinguish which is male and whichfemale. In all these cases sex may be regarded as one ofthe devices (for there are other devices in Nature) forsecuring reproduction, though we are justified in studyingthe phenomena of sex apart from the question of reproduction.However true itmay be that reproduction isNature's primary aim, it is equally true that sexual reproductionisonly one of several devices for attaining thatendẆe are bound to assume that in every sex-chromosome,whether XX or XY, resides the physical basisof an impulsewhich tends to impose the male type or the femaleindividual. When two individualstype on the developingof different races, as of some moths (in which the phenomenahave been specially studied) are bred together,the offspring often ceases to be normal, and the male off-[225]