Sexual inversion is a theory of homosexuality popular primarily in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sexual inversion was believed to be an inborn reversal of gender traits: male inverts were, to a greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally female pursuits and dress and vice versa; along with gay men, male sexual inversion also encompassed those assigned male at birth we today know as transfeminine, though limited only to those attracted to men or both sexes, but never women on their own, since attraction to men for male inverts was a central part of the theory. The sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing described female sexual inversion as "the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom".
Initially confined to medical texts, the concept of sexual inversion was given wide currency by Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, which was written in part to popularize the sexologists' views. Published with a foreword by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, it consistently used the term "invert" to refer to its protagonist, who bore a strong resemblance to one of Krafft-Ebing's case studies.
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