ion.

Whatever its ultimate explanation, sexual inversion may thus fairly be
considered a "sport," or variation, one of those organic aberrations which
we see throughout living nature, in plants and in animals.

It is not here asserted, as I would carefully point out, that an inverted
sexual instinct, or organ for such instinct, is developed in early
embryonic life; such a notion is rightly rejected as absurd. What we may
reasonably regard as formed at an early stage of development is strictly a
predisposition; that is to say, such a modification of the organism that
it becomes more adapted than the normal or average organism to experience
sexual attraction to the same sex. The sexual invert may thus be roughly
compared to the congenital idiot, to the instinctive criminal, to the man
of genius, who are all not strictly concordant with the usual biological
variation (because this is of a less subtle character), but who become
somewhat more intelligible to us if we bear in mind their affinity to
variations. Symonds compared inversion to color-blindness; and such a
comparison is reasonable. Just as the ordinary color-blind person is
congenitally insensitive to those red-green rays which are precisely the
most impressive to the normal eye, and gives an extended value to the
other colors,--finding that blood is the same color as grass, and a florid
complexion blue as the sky,--so the invert fails to see emotional values
patent to normal persons, transferring those values to emotional
associations which, for the rest of the world, are utterly distinct. Or we
may compare inversion to such a phenomenon as color-hearing, in which
there is not so much defect as an abnormality of nervous tracks producing
new and involuntary combinations. Just as the color-hearer instinctively
associates colors with sounds, like the young Japanese lady who remarked
when listening to singing, "That boy's voice is red!" so the invert has
his sexual sensations brought into relationship with objects that are
normally without sexual appeal.[237] And inversion, like color-hearing is
found more commonly in young subjects, tending to become less marked, or
to die out, after puberty. Color-hearing, while an abnormal phenomenon, it
must be added, cannot be called a diseased condition, and it is probably
much less frequently associated with other abnormal or degenerative
stigmata than is inversion; there is often a congenital element, shown by
the tendency to