In an 1869 article in a
prestigious German medical journal, Karl
Westphal introduced a new mental disorder he called "Contrary
Sexual Feeling," a problem brought to his attention by Karl
Ulrichs' pamphlets. According to Westphal, male inverts
exhibit obvious signs of effeminacy and experience sexual desire directed
toward their own sex. Similarly, female inverts, including a case
he reported on, are tomboys who turn away from "normal" sexual
contacts with men, favoring other women instead. Westphal
and his successors like Richard von
Krafft-Ebing viewed sexual inversion as a mental disease, and
popularized the notion that male inverts are profoundly feminine and
delicate.
The term survived in the
psychiatric literature as "sexual inversion," due to a poor
translation from German into English. Even though Havelock
Ellis rejected the idea that male inverts are necessarily girlish,
he clung to the term and named his 1896 book Sexual
Inversion.
Early in the twentieth
century, the term gradually disappeared from psychiatric literature in
favor of "homosexual."
