Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/40

10 intensely, feminine and childlike than the mater familias. Many are also naturally polyandrous. At the feminine pole we find the helpless cry-baby species of woman. 'The author aspired to be of this type, and always, when impersonating a woman, acted out this type.

As already indicated, the participation of the transitional individuals in the characters of the two sexes varies in all degrees. There may be simply a union of the perfect body of one sex with the susceptibility to such sexual charms as ordinarily attract the other sex alone, or with the mental traits of the other sex. Or the individual may possess the male genitals, but be beardless, or else possess mammary glands, broad pelvis, and sacral dimples; or possessing the female genitals, have a rudimentary moustache, or else meagrely developed breasts, narrow pelvis, etc. Instances have been known of human beings with an ovary on one side of the body and a testicle on the other, and of males who were able to suckle infants.

As to my own feminine characteristics, I have been told by intimate associates from boyhood down to my middle forties—when this book goes to press—that I markedly resemble a female physically, besides having instinctive gestures, poses, and habits that are characteristically feminine. My schoolmates said that I would make a good-looking girl and that kissing me was "as good as kissing a girl." When I was fourteen, one of them remarked that my calves were "as shapely as those of a girl." My associates in college have remarked how much I was like a woman in form and manners, though they