# The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life/Chapter XII

CHAPTER XII.
Is the Uranian a Higher or a Lower Sex and Type in the Scale of Humanity?
A vital Question.
Two Scientific Theories.
Two great camps, so to say, yet exist in the specialists study of similisexualism. One group ( including many strong names in scientific medicine and medical psychiatry) declare that the Uranian is a morbid human product, an aberration, an "abnormal." To hundreds of jurists he is indisputably a criminal; except if insane. Another group, equally dignified and firm, holds to the theory that uranianism is the manifestation of a species of natural intersex; not technically pathological. Such views, as thus outlined, naturally consider the average Uranian, in his intellectual, moral, sexual, psychic and physical attributes, not as to what is generally called vicious, decadent or degenerate, etc. In each faction the arguments are sharp. Needs not to be said, that there are numerous contingents of psychiatric observers, whose judgments halt between the two extremes, exhibiting various differences.
"Who Shall Decide When Doctors Disagree?
The Puzzling Distinction.
A summary of just this confusion and contrast may be cited here from the psychological romance already referred to in this study several times, on account of its aim at serious suggestiveness—"Imre: A Memorandum": The passage is a part of the narrative of one of the two protagonists (Oswald) in the tale, as to his bewildered reflections on contrasts in uranian types:
"The more perplexed I became in all this wretchedness (for it had grown to that by the time I had reached my majority) … the more perplexed I became because so often in books, old ones or new, nay, in the very chronicles of the criminal-courts, I came face to face with the fact that though tens of thousands of men, in all epochs, of noblest natures, of most brilliant minds and gifts, of intensest energies .. scores of pure spirits, deep philosophers, bravest soldiers, highest poets and artists, had been such as myself in this mystic sex-organization (or sex-disorganization) that nevertheless of this same Race, the Race-Homosexual, had been also, and apparently ever would be, countless ignoble, trivial, loathesome, feeble-souled and feeble-bodied creatures!—the weaklings—the very rubbish of humanity! Did not the widest overlook of the record of Uranianism, the average facts about one, suggest that the most part of homosexual mankind had always belonged, always would belong, to the worthless or the wicked?
"Those, those, terrified me, Imre! To think of them shamed me; those types of man-loving-men who, by thousands, live incapable of any noble ideals or lives. Ah, those patently depraved, noxious, flaccid, gross, womanish beings! perverted and imperfect in moral nature and in even their bodily tissues! Those homosexual legions that are the straw-chaff of society; good for nothing except the fire that purges the world of garbage and rubbish! A Heliogabalus, a Gilles de Rais, a Henri Trois, a Marquis de Sade; the painted male-prostitutes of the boulevards and twilight-glooming squares! The effeminate artists, the sugary and fibreless musicians! The Lady-Nancyish, rich young men of higher or lover society; twaddling æsthetic sophistries; stinking with perfume like cocottes! The second-rate poets and the neurasthenic, précieux poetasters who rhyme forth their forged literary passports out of their mere human decadence; out of their marrowless shams of all that is a man's fancy, a man's heart, a man's love-life! The cynical debauchers of little boys; the pederastic perverters of clean-minded lads in their teens; the white-haired satyrs of clubs and latrines!"
"What a contrast are these to the heroes and heroic intellects of Greece and Rome! To a Themistocles, an Agesilaus, an Aristides ​and a Kleomenes; to Socrates and Plato, and Saint Augustine; to Servetus and Beza; to Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Augustus, and Hadrian; to Sweden's Charles the Twelfth, to Frederick the Great, to indomitable Tilly, to the fiery Skobeleff, the austere Gordon, the ill-starred Macdonald; to great Oriental princes; to the brightest lyrists and dramatists of old Hellas and Italia; to Shakespeare, (to Marlowe also, as we can well believe) Platen, Grillparzer, Hölderlin, Byron, Whitman; to an Isaac Newton, a Justus Liebig—to the masterly Jérôme Duquesnoy, the classic-souled Winckelmann; to Mirabeau, Beethoven, to Bavaria's unhappy King Ludwig;—to an endless procesion of "exceptional men," from epoch to epoch! As to these and innumerable others, whose hidden, and inner lives have proved without shadow of doubt (however rigidly suppressed as 'popular information') or by inferences vivid enough to silence scornful denial, that they belonged to Us."
"That redeeming Rest of us! That Rest, over and over again, typified! Uranians so high-minded, often of such deserved honour from all that world which has either known nothing of their sexual lives, or else has perceived vaguely, and with a tacit, reluctant pardon! Could one really believe in God as making man to live at all,and to love at all, and yet at the same time believe that this love is not created, too, by God? is not of God's own divinest Nature, rightfully, eternally—in milions of hearts?… Could one believe that the eternal human essence is in its texture today so different from itself of immemorial time before now, whether Greek, Latin, Persian, or English? Could one somehow find in his spirit no dread through this, none, at the idea of facing God, as his Judge, at any instant?… could one feel at moments such strength of confidence that what was in him so was righteousness?—oh, could all this be?—and yet must a man shudder before himself as a monster, a solitary and pernicious being—diseased, leprous, gangrened—one that must stagger along on the road of life, ever justly bleeding and ever the more wearied, till Death would meet him, and say "Come—enough! Be free of all! Most and best thing of all, be free of—thyself!"
The Accent of Aesthetics Rather Than of Ethics in Uranians.
The question of the Uraniad as tending—at her best—to present an advance toward a superior and idealized development of humanity has naturally largely the same aspects, pro and contra, as in the case of. the Uranian. The transference of the problem to the feminine Intersex has however many considerations that cannot find place in the present study.
The Uranian Himself, as Arbiter?
The Uranian as as a Philosopher and Christian.
Is he right? Is he wrong?
Perhaps He Is Right—?