The venereal feeling also proceeds from different causes; in men from
the desire of emission, and in women from the desire of reception. All
these things, then, considered I cannot but wonder, he adds, how any one
can imagine that the female genital organs can be changed into the male
organ, since the sexes can be distinguished only by those parts, nor
can I well impute the reason for this vulgar error to anything but the
mistake of inexpert midwives, who have been deceived by the faulty
conformation of those parts, which in some males may have happened to
have such small protrusions that they could not be seen, as appears by
the example of a child who was christened in Paris under the name of
_Ivan_, as a girl, and who afterwards turned out to be a boy, and on the
other hand, the excessive tension of the clytoris in newly-born female
infants may have occasioned similar mistakes. Thus far Pliny in the
negative, and notwithstanding what he has said, there are others, such
as Galen, who assert the affirmative. "A man," he says, "is different
from a woman, only by having his genitals outside his body, whereas a
woman has them inside her." And this is certain, that if Nature having
formed a male should convert him into a female, she has nothing else to
do but to turn his genitals inward, and again to turn a woman into a man
by a contrary operation.
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