Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/35

 foolishly expected such natural differences would be expressed. The average eye and mind have never learned even how to look for them, though they are around us daily in their positive attributes. They are the less perceived because their physical differences from the one or the other removed sex toward which they incline, but to which they do not attain, are not necessarily readily visible. Their subtle separation from their Over-sex begins at a deeper plane, on that alone, constantly—the psychological, not physical. What masks particularly its presence is that even the psychology stays in hiding; the student must be trained to recognize its signs. Especially are these Intersexes established, determined and excused, by one supremely natural factor in them—the sexual instincts. This is their master-separation, although other traits are more or less concurrent and logical therein. Such Intersexes express the half-steps, the between-beings. Their existence is as irrefutable as immemorial. For centuries, the world has narrowed-down mankind into two sexes. There are at least two more than our traditional anthropological spectrum has perceived and recognized; each of primary importance always.

The theory of these Intersexes is likely to be startling to the layman, as soon as he thinks of it otherwise than as a fantasy, and begins to perceive its practical bearings on the world's social systems. For, undeniably, by an unavoidable succession of its applications it has much in it revolutionary of social, moral and individual life. We must reconsider many old conclusions, especially many theories of the sexual instincts, in all races and civilizations. Lifelong ideas, rooted prejudices suddenly are sapped under its chemistry. Impulses in intersexual humanity, in the "between-man" or the "between-woman" working out their own emotional natures helplessly and independently even while mocked or denounced therefor, are not to be judged by pulpit or