"Males" and "Females"
In the widest treatment of most living things, a blunt separation of them into
males and females no longer suffices for the known facts. The limitations of
these conceptions have been felt more or less by many writers. The first
purpose of this work is to make this point clear.
I agree with other authors who, in a recent treatment of the facts connected
with this subject, have taken as a starting- point what has been established
by embryology regarding the existence in human beings, plants, and animals of
an embryonic stage neutral as regards sex.
In the case of a human embryo of less than five weeks, for instance, the sex
to which it would afterwards belong cannot be recognised. In the fifth week of
foetal life processes begin which, by the end of the fifth month of pregnancy,
have turned the genital rudiments, at first alike in the sexes, into one sex
and have determined the sex of the whole organism. The details of these
processes need not be described more fully here. It can be shown that however
distinctly unisexual an adult plant, animal or human being may be, there is
always a certain persistence of the bisexual character, never a complete
disappearance of the characters of the undeveloped sex. Sexual
differentiation, in fact, is never complete. All the peculiarities of the male
sex may be present in the female in some form, however weakly developed; and
so also the sexual characteristics of the woman persist in the man, although
perhaps they are not so completely rudimentary. The characters of the other
sex occur in the one sex in a vestigial form. Thus, in the case of human
beings, in which our interest is greatest, to take an example, it will be
found that the most womanly woman has a growth of colourless hair, known as
"lanugo" in the position of the male beard; and in the most manly man there
are developed under the skin of the breast, masses of glandular tissue
connected with the nipples. This condition of things has been minutely
investigated in the true genital organs and ducts, the region called the
"urino-genital tract," and in each sex there has been found a complete but
rudimentary set of parallels to the organs of the other sex.
. . . The fact is that males and females are like two substances combined in
different proportions, but with either element never wholly missing. We find,
so to speak, never either a man or a woman, but only the male condition and
the female condition. Any individual is never to be designated merely as a man
or a woman, but by a formula showing that it is a composite of male and female
characters in different proportions.
. . . The absolute conditions at the two extremes are not metaphysical
abstractions above or outside the world of experience, but their construction
is necessary as a philosophical and practical mode of describing the actual
world.
A presentiment of this bisexuality of life (derived from the actual absence of
complete sexual differentiation) is very old. Traces of it may be found in
Chinese myths, but it became active in Greek thought. We may recall the
mythical personification of bisexuality in the Hermaphroditos, the narrative
of Aristophanes in the Platonic dialogue, or in later times the suggestion of
a Gnostic sect (Theophites) that primitive man was a "man-woman."
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