Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/539

 with no specters of police-courts to trouble them. Boudoirs, baths and brothels are a rendezvous, day by day; immune of penalties. Such matters as bestiality, proxenetism and other special offences are punishable; but within the pale of assenting privacy, the adult Uraniad is a free agent to do what she pleases—when, where and how her sexual passion suggests, be it nobly or indeed degenerately.

Here an injustice in the existing laws of all States, European, American, or what others, is plain. They tolerate-by implication—feminosexuality, while so severe against masculine relations. The Uraniad's instinct is as "unnatural," is as "immoral" and as "vicious" as is the Uranian's instinct. Inconsistence, partiality and legal injustice are obvious. Logically the Uraniad is obnoxious to prosecution and to social contempt: but her loves are tacitly licensed. Even uraniad prostitution is at liberty to exercise its activities under clandestine conditions.

The propriety of "an equal law as Berlin, 1909. to masculine and feminine intersexual practices and scandals, if there is to be any legislation at all concerning the matter, was strikingly illustrated very lately (April 1909) in Berlin, by a legal affair—already noted. A Berlin woman's-club, of smart class, had become notoriously one for feminosexuals. It even advertised for recruits; and admittance to it was by passwords—some of them most suggestive. A Berlin paper attacked this society of—sapphists. (One of the members had been divorced because of her intimacies in the club.) The club sued the newspaper for slander. It lost its case wholly, so convincing was the evidence that the members were lesbians—nearly all of them—and that their handsome locale was a regular rendezvous. Had a similar result occurred as to a club of male intersexuals, there would have been arrests right and left, as the suit ended.