third sexes

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)
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

   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

   Synonyms:

   first estate, spirituality, spiritualty, clergy