ABSTRACT
This usage of the term ‘bisexuality’ has changed, however, by the time that the third edition of the Studies is published in 1915 (with Sexual Inversion now having become Volume II). Ellis now abandons the term ‘psychosexual hermaphroditism’ and extends the meaning of ‘bisexuality’
to cover not just sexual dimorphism, but also the sexual desire for both women and men experienced by some of his subjects. He indicates that in this he is following the popular usage of the time, and this therefore suggests that the term ‘bisexuality’ began to be widely used in this sense in English during the first few years of the twentieth century. Ellis also notes that even the apparently simple classification of subjects as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual is in practice so difficult as to be hardly worth attempting; this problem has been a key concern in the literature on bisexuality ever since, both for those attempting to develop scales for the ‘measurement’ of sexual orientation (see Chapter 6), and for those arguing that bisexuality is inherently disruptive of categorization as such (see Part III).
