Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/167

Rh most serious charges. (This practically happened in 1905.) What other class of men is treated thus by the law and public opinion?

The reader may reply: "If they don't want to suffer in this way, let them stay home and keep away from people who deal thus with them." But inverts often have to follow their own nature, although they have striven hard to act according to the nature of the majority of men. With the present organization of society, and the present extreme scorn manifested toward victims of inversion, it is only natural, and almost necessary, if inverts desire to preserve the respect of their every-day circles, that they should visit incognito some section of a great city remote from their own. Suppose in a war between two tribes of red men, a brave is captured, consigned to adopt the dress and occupation of a squaw, and is in every way treated as a squaw. Would this unnatural life be to the brave's tastes? Would he be blamed if he sought to escape where he could live according to his masculine inclinations? No more is the passive invert to be blamed for escaping occasionally where he can live according to his quasi-feminine instincts.

The remedy lies in the dissemination of just and correct views of inversion, the removal of the deepseated but ill founded prejudice against individuals thus marked by Nature which is regnant in all classes of society, and the repeal of the unjustified laws against inverts, which more than anything else account for the unthinking man's persecution of these stepchildren of Nature. Then like the red-man androgyne, his cultured counterpart can, with-