Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/34

, and their indispensable system of attributes, as being other than two widely-parted extremes. Nature constantly demands of us why we have endowed our ideals of the two sexes with only such or such qualities; by what right we have gone on insisting that each specimen of sex in humanity must conform absolutely to two theories, must follow out two programmes only, or else be thought amiss, imperfect and degenerate. Why have we set up masculinity and femininity as processes that have not perfectly logical and respectable inter-steps? We have established, we have decked out, to our own ideas, just two sexes. Where presently we are confronted by what appears an abnormality in their expression we have said that that expression is imperfect, and to be repudiated. The fact is that have we lacked charter-right, guidance and warrant for our arrogance. Generation after generation, we have gone on, judging humanity sexually without full initial authority. Nature, on the contrary, all the while, ever has been striving patiently, silently, to remind us that we have been too narrow; that what we call the exceptional, the abnormal, may be perfectly normal; mature to itself and entlited to its own independent place and recognition in anthropology and society. In defining sex for instance, Nature would nut permit us to forget, that the physique of the unborn child so embodies for many weeks the traits of two sexes that the skilled anatomist cannot tell us whether the foetus should have been born a boy or a girl.

Thus become clear the inference, the conviction, logical truth that cyclic Nature has always maintained in the human species a series of graduated and necessary Intersexes, between the two great major sexes that we recognize as distinctively "man" and "woman" i. e. as the extreme masculine and the extreme feminine. These Intersexes are not physically obvious in the frapjik degree that we have