Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/138

 word presupposes something too much. The question of change in the Uranian depends on how far his nature is completely inborn; how far it may be bred in temperament and nerve; how far absolute intersex; in what degree there has been prenatal condition. How much of the manifestation is a cultivation, by the individual, how much is a psychic process associated even with physiologic traits?—though, as we have pointed out a typical physique is not essential. Can we "cure" Nature? Can we make the leopard change his spots?

We must here, particularly meet here a series of fundamental errors of not only the popular notion, but of even the scientific mind, time and again; viz, that the Uranian suffers from a nervous disease; that his status is indisputably "pathological;" that his outward type determines his sex; and that in consequence of being intersexual he is morally vicious, degenerate, and criminal. We have seen how modern law, in many parts of the world, still makes him the latter type. We see how statute-books visit on him the penalty of his "contrary" intersexual condition, with truculent severity. But this all is acting toward a man much as if the man were to be punished because he has a leg or arm shorter than his next-door neighbour, or prefers vegetable diet to fleshmeats. Of "moral cure" often there should be no question, because no need. Complete, inborn, intersexual uranianism cannot be "cured". The shame of a gross blunder falls to the psychiater who promises a "cure" of what is not a disease. Too many a doctor, otherwise intelligent and honest, advises marriage as a "remedy"; or experimentally commits his patient to courses of useless "normal" sexuality. In vain does the real, innate Uranian seek to feel as to woman the absorbingly aesthetic, the intellectual, the sexual drawing awakened in him by a male. The male is the only natural completion of his Ego. In vain does such an Uranian