Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/279

Rh viewed from a distance of forty feet, but close by his face is seen to be covered with very fine wrinkles such as appear in the face of an ordinary individual only when past the age of eighty.

Having now (1918) arrived near the close of a halfcentury of life as an androgyne, I find my vita sexualis practically at an end, and feel thereby liberated from an incubus which has hitherto prevented my making the most of my god-given faculties. As I look back on life, I am of the opinion that I have had a "hard row to hoe." In occasional spells of anguish, I have been tempted, like the patriarch Job, to "curse God and die," because He created me a "degenerate", a person almost universally despised and hated for proclivities and acts for which he is not really responsible. On such occasions, I have also, in the deep gloom which the realization of my perverted nature brings upon me, importuned the Creator to show mercy on me, who have been appointed to such a terrible fate. In my more spiritual moods I shrink from the memory of the experiences through which my abnormality caused me to pass, and am overwhelmed with despair at the thought of the depths of perdition to which cultured humanity consigns the androgyne who yields to his instincts.

I trust that the publication of my life story will contribute to a correct estimate of androgynism on the part of scientists, the molders of public opinion, and the lawmakers, and to a more kindly treatment by society of those born with this curse. It is only expressing half the truth to say that they are more to be pitied than scorned. They are wholly to be pitied.

October, 1918.