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Updated: July 12, 2025
Cases of partial reversal, sometimes called "intersexes," are common enough. In birds and insects, where the material is less expensive and experimentation simpler, males have been produced from female-predisposed fertilized eggs and vice versa, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Intersexes in moths; Bird intersexes; Higher metabolism of males; Quantitative difference between sex factors; Old ideas of intersexuality; Modern surgery and human intersexes; Quantitative theory a Mendelian explanation; Peculiar complication in the case of man; Chemical life cycles of the sexes; Functional-reproductive period and the sex problem; Relative significance of physiological sex differences.
Mating European moths with European, or Japanese with Japanese, produced pure, uniform sex-types, male and female. But a cross of European with Japanese strains resulted in intersexes. Goldschmidt concluded that all individuals carried the genetic basis for both sexes; and that these basic factors were two chemicals of enzyme nature.
The 19th century produced a copious psychological treatment of warped or reversed sexual impulses by such men as Moll, Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis. There is much ground for scepticism about this. To begin with, the biological experiments indicate that intersexes are peculiarly likely to appear where two or more races are mixed.
In brief, then, the quantitative theory of sex is merely the most reasonable explanation of the known fact that intersexes exist that is, females with some male characteristics, or with all their characters more like the female type than the average, and vice versa.
One of these hybrids of "intersexes," as he calls them, would always possess some female and some male sexual characters. He found that he could separate the males and females, respectively, into seven distinct grades with respect to their modification toward the opposite-sex type, and could produce any one of these grades at will by breeding.
Intersexes in the human species not only the extreme pathological cases represented by the so-called "hermaphrodites," but also merely masculine women and effeminate men have been the subject of serious remarks as well as literary gibes from the earliest times. The Greeks called these people urnings. Schopenhauer was interested in the vast ancient literature and philosophy on this subject.
Goldschmidt was able to work out the strengths of the doses of each sex in his various individuals, and thereby to predict the exact grade of intersexuality which would result from a given cross. As in the Free-Martin cattle, there is an apparent reversal of the sex predisposition of the fertilized egg. As in the gypsy moths, different grades of intersexes were observed.
Bearing in mind the fact that the genetic basis for both sexes exists in each individual, are not some women more masculine than others, some men more feminine than others? However much we may object to stating it just that way, the biological fact remains thus. The Greeks called these intermediate types urnings modern biology knows them as "intersexes."
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