Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/200

 example of this. Almost every phase of the boy-uranian, whether at home or in school, and college, finds its parallel in the Uraniad, in her early environment. Like the Uranian, the Uraniad is constantly an inborn, precociously intersexual existence. Her nature as a little girl, at home, in the nursery and schoolroom or away at school, often pulsates with an irresistible directness. The present tendency to educate young women in colleges for "girls only", promotes feminine similisexuality. American and English girl-colleges are famous cultivators of the passions that belong to the Uraniad. Often a mature Uraniad looks back over a long life, in which not for one moment since her first friendships, her earliest "teens", her college intimacies, has she been other than a woman-loving woman. Possibly she finds that a long life has been saddened by the possession of precocious sexual impulses which she has neither dared to disclose, nor even now has begun to understand; in which her university-life, with its encouragements to masculine ways of thought, feeling, dress and sentimentalisms, has been a potent factor.

Inborn Uranianism in a youth, and real and inborn Uraniadism in a girl (the latter's outlook less decisively) cannot be "cured". If genuine, it defies "remedial" processes. Acquired similisexualism of a superficial quality frequently passes away in women under matrimonial influences, maternal emotions and other alterants. The parent, the tutor, the mature friend of an Uranian boy can help the lad to grow up with his similisexual instincts in reasonable physical and moral restraint. Intelligence and tact can define the course to prevent the boy from becoming as a homosexual man, what so many grow up to be—degenerates, criminals and victims. But beyond such solicitous, tactful help to a lad no results can be achieved, in nine cases in ten,—except illusions and failures.