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Although Balsę does not specifically mention the hijras in this passage, her sug-gestion that isolation ultimately provokes men to “tell dirty jokes” or turn to ho-mosexuality echoes the opinion of Sharma, who asserts that impotence causes the hijra to utter sexual remarks and to engage in sodomy. The image of the impotent man as a shipwrecked entity, lost in a world of reproducing heterosexuals, is also telling. The “question of progeny” referred to by Balsę is precisely what distin-guishes a hijra from a nonhijra—her inability to carry on the family lineage results in a life of social marginalization.

A few American and European anthropologists have also connected the hijras’ language use with their sexual confusion, frequently conflating the two as sim-ilar instances of perversion. Harriet Ronken Lynton and Mohini Rajan (1974), in their short introduction to the hijras in Hyderabad, are a case in point. Reminis-cent of Singhs and Sharmas analyses of the hijras use of obscenity, the authors draw a causal link between the hijras’ “manner of speech” and what they perceive to be the hijras’ self-motivated withdrawal from the rest of society: