Hall wrote The Well of Loneliness in part to popularize the ideas of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, who regarded homosexuality as an inborn and inalterable trait: congenital sexual inversion.[43] In Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), the first book Stephen finds in her father's study, inversion is described as a degenerative disorder common in families with histories of mental illness.[44] Exposure to these ideas leads Stephen to describe herself and other inverts as "hideously maimed and ugly".[45] However, later texts such as Sexual Inversion (1896) by Havelock Ellis — who contributed a foreword to The Well — described inversion simply as a difference, not as a defect. By 1901 Krafft-Ebing had adopted a similar view.[46] Hall championed their ideas over those of the psychoanalysts, who saw homosexuality as a form of arrested psychological development, and some of whom believed it could be changed.[47]
The term sexual inversion implied gender role reversal. Female inverts were, to a greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally male pursuits and dress;[48] according to Krafft-Ebing, they had a "masculine soul". Krafft-Ebing believed that the most extreme inverts also exhibited reversal of secondary sex characteristics; Ellis's research had not demonstrated any such physical differences, but he devoted a great deal of study to the search for them.[49] The idea appears in The Well in Stephen's unusual proportions at birth and in the scene set at Valerie Seymour's salon, where "the timbre of a voice, the build of an ankle, the texture of a hand" reveals the inversion of the guests.[50]
Some of the people that Ellis and Krafft-Ebing classed as inverts would probably now be considered transgender — particularly the pseudonymous Count Sandor in one of Krafft-Ebing's case studies, who passed as a man, and whose childhood experiences resemble Stephen's.[51] Michael Dillon, who in 1946 became the first female-to-male transsexual to undergo full sex reassignment surgery, used Stephen as an example in his book about his experiences,[52] and some critics now argue that Stephen Gordon is a transman rather than a lesbian.[53]
The existence of feminine women in lesbian relationships posed a problem for inversion theory, since their attraction to women could not be explained as gender reversal. Ellis had described such women as passive objects of the desire of masculine inverts. Mary, however, actively pursues the reticent Stephen. Although Stephen believes Mary is leaving her for a heterosexual life with Martin Hallam at the end of The Well, Mary's intentions are never revealed. Her future remains unknown and her sexual identity unclear.[54]
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