It would harmonize with what we know
of the occasional delayed manifestations of homosexuality, and would not
clash with their congenital nature, for we know that a disordered state of
the thymus, for instance, may be hereditary, and it is held that status
lymphaticus may be either inborn or acquired.[235] Normal sexual
characters seem to depend largely upon the due co-ordination of the
internal secretions, and it is reasonable to suppose that sexual
deviations depend upon their inco-ordination. If a man is a man, and a
woman a woman, because (in Blair Bell's phrase) of the totality of their
internal secretions, the intermediate stages between the man and the woman
must be due to redistribution of those internal secretions.[236]
We know that various internal secretions possess an influential sexual
effect. Thus the atrophy of the thymus seems to be connected with sexual
development at puberty; the thyroid reinforces the genital glands; adrenal
overdevelopment can produce in a female the secondary characteristics of
the male, as well as cause precocious development of maleness; etc.
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