Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/272

 many women are well-trained professional hands on the native coast-ships. Some Chinese ports have a large fleet of women-manned boats. Lately in Bristol an excellent seaman disclosed her sex as feminine to a hospital-doctor, as a secret for many years undetected. The second officer of an American ship, personally known to a friend of the writer of this study, is a woman; which fact seems not even suspected by her ship-mates, after years of service.

Many of these examples are undoubtedly not so much those of the Uraniad completely, amatively such, as either of "asexuals"; or of women more or less masculinized in body, temperament, nerves and intellects. But they illustrate departurer from the feminine toward an Intersex. of manifest individuality, and of characteristically similisexual impulses in love-desire.

Female acrobats, women-riders in circuses and so on, are femino-sexual in a considerable proportion. Communications that the writer has received from a physician with a considerable clientage of acrobatic women, indicate several who prefer peculiarly feminine women as object of sexual intercourse. The most intimate friend of a female royal personage of great beauty, much spoken of as feminosexual, was a "star" of the Continental ring; a magnificent equestrienne, she was said to-be also of abnormal physical development. The intimacy was close enough to add to the gossip about one of the most gifted and unhappy of sovereigns who ever mounted, not horses, which she loved, but a throne that she hated. The severer athletic and acrobatic professions are however emphatically those in which sexual impulses of any sort must be most carefully controlled; eveu [sic] to severe repression of their physical gratifications.