The definition of female homosexuality started to change as the concept gradually began to refer less to a practice than to an identity. Passion became “sexual relations,” and perversity made way for “unnatural acts.” Medical experts were in effect establishing the idea of a sexual norm when they undertook the classification of sexual deviations and other “marginal sexualities.” They developed a vast vocabulary – mingling scientific terms and slang – to name various attributes of women who were now suddenly known as “inverts” and members of a zoological category. This vocabulary of condemnation reveals all the scorn that the lesbian figure, straddling ridicule and depravity, could elicit from her contemporaries. This lexicon contributed to establishing a truly decadent mythology of the lesbian.