third sex

English

Noun

third sex (plural third sexes)

1. A third gender, a category of people who are not male or female, or whose sexual roles, anatomy, or identities place them outside of the established male and female categories.
   • c. 1913, Hartmann Grisar (author), E. M. Lamond (translator), Luther (Complete) (2020 Library of Alexandria edition: →ISBN; Gutenberg):

     The words of St. Paul in Cor. vii., of Our Lord in Mat. xix., concerning the third sex of the eunuchs, and of St. John in Apoc. xiv.,

   • 2011, Richard Totman, The Third Sex: Kathoey: Thailand's Ladyboys, Souvenir Press Ltd, →ISBN:

     In her book entitled Neither Man nor Woman, Serena Nanda gives a fascinating account of the hijras of India. Hijras are India's third sex.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:third sex.
2. (dated, collective) Gay people.
   • 1966, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 5, in The Crying of Lot 49, New York: Bantam Books, published 1976, →ISBN, page 81:

     “Now in here,” their guide, sweating dark tentacles into his tab collar, briefed them, “you are going to see the members of the third sex, the lavender crowd this city by the Bay is so justly famous for.

   • 1996, Tess Cosslett, Alison Easton, Penny Summerfield, Women, Power and Resistance, UK: McGraw-Hill Education, →ISBN, page 177:

     Similarly, in the 1920s, Radclyffe Hall, a lesbian author, wrote The Well of Loneliness, in which she called for sympathy and understanding for the third sex of inverts such as herself, trapped in the wrong body, who could not help their condition […]

3. (dated, collective) The clergy, the priesthood (seen as emasculate or not participating in sex).
   • 1894, George William Foote, Flowers of Freethought, page 205:

     It is not surprising, then, that the Christian Churches […] extend just sufficient verbal patronage to labor to save themselves from being howled at, […] the clergy, who, as Sidney Smith said, are a third sex — neither male nor female, but effeminate — are instinctively conservative, thoroughly enamored of what is, and obstinately averse to all radical changes. Their timidity would be quite phenomenal, if they were not the third sex; and, like all timid people, they can shriek and yell and curse and foam at the mouth when they are well frightened.

   • 1918, John Lewin McLeish, High Lights of the Mexican Revolution: Some Previously Unwritten History of the Beginning and Growth of Constitutional Government in the Southern Republic, page 49:

     The richest of the lands of Mexico were owned by the blackrobed members of [the] Third Sex, the Clergy. Over the humblest peon family they wielded supreme sway through their fat itinerant friars.

   • 2011, John H. Arnold, Sean Brady, What is Masculinity?: Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN, page 62:

     In particular, it draws into question the approach taken by a number of commentators on the gender status of the later medieval clergy, who have been regarded as a third sex, or even an 'emasculinity', on account of their exclusion from legitimate sexual activity.

Translations

Further reading

• “third sex”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.