third sex

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.
   • 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., […]c. 1913, Hartmann Grisar (author), E. M. Lamond (translator), Luther (Complete) (2020 Library of Alexandria edition: →ISBN; Gutenberg)
   • 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.2011, Richard Totman, The Third Sex: Kathoey: Thailand's Ladyboys, Souvenir Press Ltd, →ISBN
2. (collective, dated) Gay people.
   • “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.1966 March, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 5, in The Crying of Lot 49, New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books, published November 1976, →ISBN, page 81
   • 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 […]1996, Tess Cosslett, Alison Easton, Penny Summerfield, Women, Power and Resistance, UK: McGraw-Hill Education, →ISBN, page 177

   Synonyms:

   gaydom

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

   Synonyms:

   first estate, spirituality, spiritualty, clergy