Medicalizing homosexuality as congenital was a defense against criminal punishment

Evidence

Ellis nevertheless tried to put sexuality on the Progressive era’s agenda. This self-described friend of the yet unnamed LGBT community popularized the term “homosexual,” classifying it as a congenital physiological abnormality (or “sexual inversion”). Ellis aimed to defend homosexuality against the “law and public opinion” that regarded homosexuals as criminals in the late nineteenth-century English-speaking world. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 739

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the book’s core pattern: a purportedly scientific classification, presented to ‘defend’ a group, which actually legitimizes a hierarchy.
• DEFINE: Establishes the origin of ‘homosexual’ and ‘sexual inversion’ as congenital — a medically-pathologizing framing that parallels how race was classified.