Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/27

 AUTHOR'S PREFACE

From childhood I have been unusually introspective. I began to keep a diary at the age of fourteen, and have continued it up to past the age of forty almost without intermission. Even my earliest diaries dealt with the phenomena of my sexual life, so that in general I have had to keep them under lock and key.

The third physician from whom I sought a cure for my sexual abnormality gave me to understand as early as 1892 that my case was a remarkable one. This pronouncement incited me still further to keep a record of what life brought me with a view to writing an autobiography some day.

In 1899, at the age of twenty-five, I wrote the accompanying account of my life down to that age, and subsequently added accounts of significant events as they occurred. I also from time to time edited and made inserts in what I had already written. As a result, parts of some pages were written in different years. The book has been fated to wait eighteen years for publication, primarily because American medical publishers—on the basis of the attitude of the profession—have had an antipathy against books dealing with abnormal sexual phenomena. 1