far as to class the homosexual as "real
pseudohermaphrodites," exactly comparable to a man with a female
breast or a woman with a beard, and proposes to term
homosexuality "pseudohermaphroditus masculinus psychicus." This,
however, is an unnecessary and scarcely satisfactory confusion.

To place the group of homosexual phenomena among other intermediate groups
on the organic bisexual basis is a convenient classification. It can
scarcely be regarded as a complete explanation. It is probable that we may
ultimately find a more fundamental source of these various phenomena in
the stimulating and inhibiting play of the internal secretions.[234] Our
knowledge of the intimate association between the hormones and sexual
phenomena is already sufficient to make such an explanation intelligible;
the complex interaction of the glandular internal secretions and their
liability to varying disturbance in balance may well suffice to account
for the complexity of the phenomena. It would harmonize with what we know
of the occasional delayed manifestations of homosexuality, and would not
clash with their congenital nature, for we know that a disordered state of
the thymus, for instance, may be hereditary, and it is held that status
lymphaticus may be either inborn or acquired.[235] Normal sexual
characters seem to depend largely upon the due co-ordination of the
internal secretions, and it is reasonable to suppose that sexual
deviations depend upon their inco-ordination. If a man is a man, and a
woman a woman, because (in Blair Bell's phrase) of the totality of their
internal secretions, the intermediate stages between the man and the woman
must be due to redistribution of those internal secretions.[236]

We know that various internal secretions possess an influential sexual
effect. Thus the atrophy of the thymus seems to be connected with sexual
development at puberty; the thyroid reinforces the genital glands; adrenal
overdevelopment can produce in a female the secondary characteristics of
the male, as well as cause precocious development of maleness; etc. "An
alteration in the metabolism," as F.H.A. Marshall suggests, "even in
comparatively late life, may initiate changes in the direction of the
opposite sex." Metabolic chemical processes may thus be found to furnish a
key to complex and subtle sexual variations, alike somatic and psychic,
although we must still regard such processes as arising on an inborn
predisposit