Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/34

16 psychic and physical characteristics of the one as well as the other sex." I take no stock in the theory advanced by some medical writers that androgynism (generally termed male sexual inversion) is acquired and not congenital. The exceptional method of sexual expression can be acquired only by individuals congenially on the very borderline between androgynes on the one hand and anaphrodites or mildly virile on the other. The latest proponent of the "acquired" theory, Dr. P. M. Lichtenstein, in the August, 1921, issue of MEDICAL REVIEW OF REVIEWS, suggests that masturbation in boyhood may produce in adulthood a fairie or ultra-androgyne. In my physical prime, I was a fairie of extreme type. I never masturbated as a child or as an adult because of acute horror. My own pudenda never had any part in my sexual ardor—any more than had my vermiform appendix.

Dr. Lichtenstein's suggestion of the correction by parents of feminine predilections in small boys is futile. Those feminesque traits, when congenital, as I believe they always are in ultra-androgynes, can not be suppressed. Likewise his advice that the adolescent girl-boy seek the company of the gentle sex as a cure is as futile. In my teens, I forced myself to it, but it had not the least curative value.

Note Added in Galley: I just came across a scrap of a recent NEW YORK WORLD Sunday magazine, containing "Glands That Govern Our Lives", name of author missing. I quote: "The not uncommon phenomena of the smooth-faced man with a feminine voice and a figure resembling that of a woman, and of the deep-voiced, hairy-faced masculine woman, are produced by abnormalities in the development of these glands." Only in the third decade of the twentieth century is the comparatively new branch of medical science, endocrinology (the study of glands, particularly the ductless) coming forward to maintain the irresponsibility of "homosexualists" for their indiosyncrasy. It has also only just been brought into the limelight that the testicles are invigorating (as well as masculinizing) to the individual possessing them and the prime reason for man's being physically stronger than woman. I myself, for several years after castration at the age of twenty-seven, observed a marked diminution in mv stamina. (For details, see my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE.) My own testicles were abnormal judged by the fact that I, though always having intense horror of self-manustupration, suffered from acute spermatorrhea from the incidence of puberty up to castration, while I was totally devoid of the propensity natural to full-fledged adult males for emptying the seminal vesicles.

Androgynes tend to occupations having to do with