Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/226

196 and my family disgraced, I sprinted away. After a few seconds I looked back to see whether I was followed. My terror produced the hallucination of a mob. I sprinted around corner after corner and did not rest until some distance outside the village, where I found a hiding place and moaned and complained to my Creator over my lot.

I was now afraid to show myself in the village, and unutterably downcast at being the victim of an obsession which led me to commit what are commonly regarded as revolting crimes. From this consideration, and also because of the wrecking of my health through emissions during sleep, I decided on immediate castration. Minor motives were that I would prefer to possess one less mark of the male, and that I thought the facial hair cells would cease to function and I thus be rid of my most detested and most troublesome badge of masculinity.

From the age of seventeen to nineteen, on the day following an ejaculation during sleep, I would be feeble, very forgetful, and would stammer. From nineteen on, after I had begun to yield to instinct, the ill effects were much less marked until during my twenty-eighth year—the point of time at which this autobiography has arrived—when my eyes were dim for one or two days following, my hearing was somewhat disarranged, and my heart abnormal in its action. During this period of eleven years, various remedies prescribed by physicians were without effect. I happened to be a globe-trotter, and thereby discovered that travelling, particularly sea voyages, much diminished the ejaculations. It is necessary here to