You know, I reread that sometime in the past few years, but I didn't remember much of it at the level of sentence recognition. But its being Norton sheds light on its having a fantasy tone; a lot of Norton's sf had that flavor.

Of course you're right about "Gentle Homo," but it has a different problem: Norton systematically contrasts "Gentle Homo" for a man and "Gentle Fem" for a woman. But in actual Latin homo meant a human being of either sex (like Greek anthropos); the Latin for "male human being" was vir. Norton ought to have been able to look that one up.