German lawyer Karl
Ulrichs invented Urnings in the 1860s as a
way to talk about same-sex eroticism, and sometimes he referred to both
male and female Urnings as members of a third sex. The German
physician Magnus Hirschfeld
expanded on the idea early in the 20th Century and became convinced that
homosexuals belong to a third biological sex which stands mid-way
between male and female, both mentally and physically. Edward
Carpenter, a literary man rather than a physician, popularized the idea
in England and America.
Recent studies of ostensibly
gay brains and genes undertaken by some essentialist
researchers demonstrate that even though Hirschfeld's third sex theory
is now discredited and ignored, the research tradition he began lives
on.
Link: for
photo's of Hirschfeld's three sexual types, see fact
file 1897: Hirschfeld Forms Committee.
