Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 | Page 3

and Moral
Leaders--Muret--Michelangelo--Winkelmann--Homosexuality in
English History--Walt Whitman--Verlaine--Burton's Climatic Theory
of Homosexuality--The Racial Factor--The Prevalence of
Homosexuality Today.
Sexual inversion, as here understood, means sexual instinct turned by
inborn constitutional abnormality toward persons of the same sex. It is
thus a narrower term than homosexuality, which includes all sexual
attractions between persons of the same sex, even when seemingly due
to the accidental absence of the natural objects of sexual attraction, a
phenomenon of wide occurrence among all human races and among
most of the higher animals. It is only during recent years that sexual
inversion has been recognized; previously it was not distinguished from
homosexuality in general, and homosexuality was regarded as a
national custom, as an individual vice, or as an unimportant episode in
grave forms of insanity.[1] We have further to distinguish sexual
inversion and all other forms of homosexuality from another kind of
inversion which usually remains, so far as the sexual impulse itself is
concerned, heterosexual, that is to say, normal. Inversion of this kind
leads a person to feel like a person of the opposite sex, and to adopt, so
far as possible, the tastes, habits, and dress of the opposite sex, while
the direction of the sexual impulse remains normal. This condition I
term sexo-esthetic inversion, or Eonism.
The nomenclature of the highly important form of sexual perversion
with which we are here concerned is extremely varied, and most
investigators have been much puzzled in coming to a conclusion as to

the best, most exact, and at the same time most colorless names to
apply to it.
The first in the field in modern times was Ulrichs who, as early as 1862,
used the appellation "Uranian" (Uranier), based on the well-known
myth in Plato's Banquet. Later he Germanized this term into "Urning"
for the male, and "Urningin" for the female, and referred to the
condition itself as "Urningtum." He also invented a number of other
related terms on the same basis; some of these terms have had a
considerable vogue, but they are too fanciful and high-strung to secure
general acceptance. If used in other languages than German they
certainly should not be used in their Germanized shape, and it is
scarcely legitimate to use the term "Urning" in English. "Uranian" is
more correct.
In Germany the first term accepted by recognized scientific authorities
was "contrary sexual feeling" (Konträre Sexualempfindung). It was
devised by Westphal in 1869, and used by Krafft-Ebing and Moll.
Though thus accepted by the earliest authorities in this field, and to be
regarded as a fairly harmless and vaguely descriptive term, it is
somewhat awkward, and is now little used in Germany; it was never
currently used outside Germany. It has been largely superseded by the
term "homosexuality." This also was devised (by a little-known
Hungarian doctor, Benkert, who used the pseudonym Kertbeny) in the
same year (1869), but at first attracted no attention. It has,
philologically, the awkward disadvantage of being a bastard term
compounded of Greek and Latin elements, but its significance--sexual
attraction to the same sex--is fairly clear and definite, while it is free
from any question-begging association of either favorable or
unfavorable character. (Edward Carpenter has proposed to remedy its
bastardly linguistic character by transforming it into "homogenic;" this,
however, might mean not only "toward the same sex," but "of the same
kind," and in German already possesses actually that meaning.) The
term "homosexual" has the further advantage that on account of its
classical origin it is easily translatable into many languages. It is now
the most widespread general term for the phenomena we are dealing
with, and it has been used by Hirschfeld, now the chief authority in this

field, as the title of his encyclopedic work, Die Homosexualität.
"Sexual Inversion" (in French "inversion sexuelle," and in Italian
"inversione sessuale") is the term which has from the first been chiefly
used in France and Italy, ever since Charcot and Magnan, in 1882,
published their cases of this anomaly in the Archives de Neurologie. It
had already been employed in Italy by Tamassia in the Revista
Sperimentale di Freniatria, in 1878. I have not discovered when and
where the term "sexual inversion" was first used. Possibly it first
appeared in English, for long before the paper of Charcot and Magnan I
have noticed, in an anonymous review of Westphal's first paper in the
Journal of Mental Science (then edited by Dr. Maudsley) for October,
1871, that "Conträre Sexualempfindung" is translated as "inverted
sexual proclivity." So far as I am aware, "sexual inversion" was first
used in English, as the best term, by J.A. Symonds in 1883, in his
privately printed essay, A Problem in Greek Ethics. Later, in 1897, the
same term was adopted, I believe for the first time publicly in English,
in the present work.
It