Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/273

Rh. The guilt lies with the Church and public opinion, both of which teach that no punishment is too bad for an androgyne.

[A few days after Z's death, I wrote letters to Z's father giving all my theories. I desired to do all I could to avenge my brother in calamity by bringing his assailants to justice. It would not be surprising if Z's father was disinclined to press matters because of shame over the son's being an androgyne combined with the public's so terribly misjudging androgynism. Z's near neighbor, a young college graduate whom I "pumped," told me first that the fact at the bottom of Z's death "was of such nature that it could not be discussed"! I could get at the truth only by putting repeated frank questions, since he labored under the terrible delusion that sex is a subject beyond discussion. This college man expressed the opinion that Z was wilfully depraved and "got all that was coming to him." I interviewed several others who knew the Z family merely by sight and reputation. They all showed intense antipathy, being of the opinion that a family's having an androgyne relative was sufficient cause for its ostracism.

[A personal parallel: To only one member of my own family—a brother—have I ever confessed my addiction to female-impersonation sprees. I did it twenty years ago, at the age of twenty-seven, because I then had enemies at Ft. X (at the time my regular stamping-ground) who hated androgynism so fiercely as to be capable of murdering an individual in whom the phenomenon cropped up. I therefore explained matters to a brother: that if ever I was found murdered, to look for my assassin among the common