Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/164

 "had never suspected" that her partner was not sexually masculine.

Typic is the history of a well-known Austrian Uraniad, Johanna Buchbinder. Of relatively low-class family, she was born in Vienna, and from youth was masculine in her physical type, even to being vigorously muscular. She decided early to personate a man, from reasons of convenience and innate masculinity of feeling; her vita sexualis included. She secured the legitimation-documents of a brother who had died, and she became a mechanic. She was of great bodily strength, and of a coarse temperament. She smoked, drank freely, was obliged to shave herself daily, and rode restive horses like a man. She entered into politics, having a talent for speaking and a male voice, and became active in the Social Democratic party. She was sexually interested only in women. Her sexual system was somewhat abnormal, but not hermaphroditic. In consequence of a quarrel with a woman with whom she had lived maritally, the "wife" being perfectly deceived, Johanna was involved in a stabbing-affair, and in a hospital her sex was disclosed. The remainder of her history seems lost.

In London, 1901, occurred an aristocratic suicide, that of Countess V—, a foreigner by birth, but long identified with English social life. Her death had some connection, sedulously concealed, with the uranistic nature of the deceased. Countess V— an Hungarian lady of high family, well-known in political and social affairs in its time, had been from first youth an Uraniad. She was also robust to virility, though not amazonian or coarse. She had been allowed in childhood an almost boyish liberty of tastes, amusements, dress, and so on. She was a hunter of large game and an expert boxer and fencer, when other young women are