Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/38

 are constantly working-out about us, with or without social recognition and sanction, their own sexual instincts. Too often such types are not only unknown to their fellow-men for what they are, but also too often not known to—themselves. Especially do we find them the victims of sexual repression, seekers after a sexual expression that they cannot obtain without disgraces, dangers, and crimes. Not less especially are they petitioners for at least a tentative, a cautious consideration and tolerance, social and legal; fugitives from miseries and injustices which an unreasoning and ill-informed world, with its tendency to generalize, has far too little suspected. It is true that they present inevitably and often painfully, whether taken as individuals or as classes, many traits, claims, theories, impulses, practices, deviations from the more or less normally human, which cannot be tolerated in ethics and social life by even philosophic justice however dispassionate. They have sex-idioms that repel and terrify us, no matter how elastic is our human sympathy. But admitting all which will deepen around them this undeniable shadow, the fact remains that a great proportion of Intersexual lives are led and probably for a long time to come must be led, under a sexual, social and moral ban that blots our human civilization. Day by day is continued about us, no matter with what outward serenity a chronicle of underserved martyrdom that can be dramatic beyond any description in its emotional currents; demanding relief by a psychiatric enlightenment not yet more than begun.