Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/500

 "Evidently," remarks the thoughtful reader, "to be courageous against the blackmailer is obviously the first policy! But one also sees that the victim may get himself into great trouble; coming out of the court a blacker kettle than seems the pot, or fully as black! In cases like one of the foregoing, "The sword of justice cuts the hand that grasps it!"

Blackmailing cases do take that turn. The victim can suffer shameful imprisonment, as well as can his.enemy. But the sound principle of legal resort is not invalidated by this fact. The tendency now, in many Continental courts is tactfully to "manage" the victim's case so that he does not incriminate himself. What is yet more significant, in the French, the German, the Austro-Hungarian and other Courts of law, in some Continental countries where most homosexualism acts still are a felony and an obloquy, there has come within a few years an important detail of procedure and sentiment. If the person necessarily incriminating himself in the complaint against his blackmailer, when arrested and on trial on homosexual charges, can prove medically psychiatrically, that he is homosexual by inborn, ineradicable nature, then his case is often materially made light or even dismissed. This is especially helpful when a respectable homosexual has to combat a charge against him begun not by extortion but made in the "interests of public morality". Of course there should not be offenses to public-decorum, nor rape, nor corruption of minors impairing the force of this defence. It it be accepted, the homosexual is turned over to a specialistic physician, who decides (in course of some weeks), whether his "patient" is to be reported to the Court as homosexual by incurably natural propensities or not. Sometimes this examination obliges the defendant to pass months in prison, till the doctor be ready to