The Intermediate Sex

What if Nature does not keep the ingredients of manhood and womanhood apart, but throws them crosswise—creating people who confound the categories society depends on?

Writing amid changing relations between men and women, Edward Carpenter asks readers to look closely at those he calls the “intermediate” types: people whose feelings and temperaments may cross the boundaries of bodily sex. He refuses easy verdicts, arguing that these lives deserve neither condemnation nor idealization, but patient attention. In particular, Carpenter sees the Uranian temperament’s capacity for emotional attachment as a force that may help men and women understand one another—and perhaps shape the society to come. What might these misunderstood lives reveal about love, and about the future of human nature?

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