Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/108

84 and (during my freshman and sophomore years) acute melancholia. If my physical health had been as good as that of the three men who outstripped me, I might have led my university class. I am a curiosity in that down to twenty-five, I was a fair specimen of physical infantilism or lilliputianism. I was said to possess the skull and facial lines of an infant. Down to twenty-five, I never weighed more than 110 pounds on a height of five feet five. Nearly all my brothers and uncles have been six-footers.

I am a curiosity in that I possess the light female osseous structure. Even before I began to develop adipose tissue after twenty-five, I would float on fresh water without moving a muscle, my observation being that the slim normal boy must vibrate his hands. I am a curiosity in that form of skeleton and contour of body are mostly feminine, particularly the bust.

Not until the age of nineteen, when I went successively to two medical college professors and implored them to make me a complete male, did I learn that practically all the tissues of my body are of characteristically feminine texture. My muscles, judged by their weakness and my using them in general woman-fashion, are those of a female. The beardal growth is normally male except that it could never reach the length of an eighth of an inch and has no stiffness. If I had not shaved or eradicated the beard, I would have been, after seventeen, one of the dogfaced boys of the circus. Although the hair cells seem as dense as on my scalp, I could never have exhibited virile whiskers.