ABSTRACT
Psychologically, a developing human must perceive himself or herself as male or female in order to act toward members of the same sex and members of the opposite sex in accordance with the expectations of society. The same investigators tested a group of fourteen adult hermaphrodites who had been switched from the sex of rearing to the opposite sex, to see how normal their sexual psychology was. By age three or four, in fact, children have acquired that exceedingly important component of their mature personality, their sense of sex identity. As for humans, it is well established that the sexes normally differ in sensory and perceptual behavior. Animal studies have shown that removal of a certain part of the brain affects the sex behavior of males and females differently; in rats, cats, rabbits, and guinea pigs, loss of the cortex abolishes the male mating pattern but does not similarly affect the female.
