| Karl Westphal,
a respected German physician, professor, and journal editor
published an article in the German language Archive for
Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases in which he identified a new
psychiatric disorder. He wrote that women and men whose
sexual desires turn toward members of their own sex possess
"contrary sexual feeling" and tend to have associated
mental illnesses. Women with this disorder are unusually
masculine, and men with contrary sexual feeling are
effeminate. Reasoning that the cause was probably
congenital, Westphal opposed laws like paragraph
175. He favored
medical treatment instead.
Through a series of mistranslations, the phenomenon Westphal
called "contrary sexual feeling" came to be called
sexual inversion in English. |
