ABSTRACT
The author's landmark compilation of case studies, Psychopathia Sexualis, has remained in print in various editions since its first publication in 1877. His text undertakes a vast taxonomic and diagnostic project that attempts to classify an exhaustive range of psycho-sexual variations and offer an etiology of how such variations emerge. The author considered people who called as cisgender gay men or lesbian women to have a mild form of gender inversion, in that their erotic attractions were like those of normal members of the other sex. At its most extreme, inversion culminated in metamorphosis sexualis paranoica, the psychotic belief that one was actually a member of the so-called other sex. While they are explicitly pathologizing and profoundly homophobic and transphobic, the author's case studies are important records in the history of sexuality and gender. The person described in Case 131, exemplified what the author called “gynandry” but seems easily legible as a trans man in contemporary terms.
