Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/194

166 passivity as fifty is approached. On the other hand, I have heard of mildly virile men marrying in their twenties, begetting children, and only after reaching middle age, becoming somewhat sissified, acquiring horror feminæ, like ultra-androgynes, and finally seeking the latter's sexual role.

These changes in ultra-androgynes and in the mildly virile are like menopause in woman. There is a turning point in the sex life. The hitherto passive ultra-androgyne occasionally becomes active. The mildly virile occasionally develops a quasi-feminine leaning. The latter class were possibly mildly androgynous by birth, but the idiosyncrasies did not come to the front of the mental life until the climacteric corresponding to menopause.

In my, I said nothing about my personal "menopause" because it came at about the close of my writing that book, and I did not recognize it as such until after the latter's publication. On page 197, I described how, at the age of forty-two, my weight, stripped, within six weeks, jumped from 133 to 160. For ten years, it had been stationary at 133. For the following five years, it has been stationary at 160. I now attribute the change to "menopause." Moreover, a few months after the increase in weight, I kept company with a young lady for half-a-year. I drifted into it almost unconsciously and involuntarily. I paid her gallantries immeasurably beyond any other incident of my life. I even regarded a Platonic marriage as a possibility, though not a probability.

But I was too extreme an androgyne, in addition to my having been castrated. The virility that