Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/434

 organizations; and so on. An interesting series of observations of this anatomical side of homosexualism appears in the "Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen" for 1902. The present writer examined lately a striking instance, in an Italian city.

The absurd idea of an hermaphroditic body as necessary to Uranianism belongs with an old notion in Catholic canon-laws (and others)—that the hermaphrodite must be made a sort of outlaw, as a human being divinely accursed. One «celebrated hermaphrodite has left a published study of this predicament; a kind of desperate appeal and defense. A notable hermaphrodite of the time of Trajan and Hadrian was the distinguished philosopher Favorinus, the friend of Plutarch and the instructor of Aulus Gellius. Whether the famous Chevalier d'Eon, who appeared before the world during his long and amazingly adventurous life (1728-1810) now as woman, now as man, with perfect success was hermaphroditic, and homosexual or not at all so, has never become perfectly clear. Some recent studies of his career are to the contrary. Indeed, one can-hardly class the plucky and gifted Chevalier among degenerates. He seems more an incorrigible eccentric and "mystifier;" a type in many traits vigorously—agressively—virile, as his friends and enemies soon learned to their dismay. The Abbé François de Choisy (1644-1724) offers, on somewhat similar lines to d'Eon, a temperament far more saliently degenerate and devirilized: but here again nothing classes the type as an hermaphrodite, in any exact sense of the term; and during de Choisy's bisexual career, with all its effeminacies, orgies, profligacies, aventures galantes and so on—now of masculine and now of feminine colouring—there is no question of mental degeneracy. His culture, wit, critical acuteness and general intellectual vigour are attested by his contemporaries, and by his voluminous writings on philosophy, history and religion. He seems to have assumed so much the woman because "to be a woman"