Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/69

Rh grossly misunderstood by the sexually full-fledged. By exception, Oscar Wilde was open and above board, and was therefore shut up in prison.

Only bigoted pseudo-scientists have pronounced androgynes degenerates. Only mediæval medicine, not modern medicine. Androgynism is merely an instance of arrested development; or possibly of atavism—an attempt on the part of Nature to return to the original hermaphrodism of man's early antecedents. The androgyne who follows the dictates of Nature is not a whit more degenerate morally than the fullfledged man who marries. It is only the fallible mores which make the full-fledged think that a person with apparently male pudenda who impersonates a female is infinitely below themselves morally. Were Socrates, Plato, Angelo, Raphael, and Francis Bacon monsters of depravity? Ought the Shakespeare- Author to have been buried alive by his hare-brained fellow citizens before he had a chance to pen a line?

The chief charge against androgynes is that they are guilty of "the awful crime of race suicide." But it is the fault of Nature alone that the ultra-androgyne is incapable of doing his part in the perpetuation of the race.

The cultured androgyne, knowing his irresistible instincts are harmless to his soul-mate, is unable to discern in them any transgression against ethics or against God.

But a very small proportion of adult androgynes have been guilty of a lamentable transgression because finding themselves in a tight place: that is, recourse to boys under puberty. The prudery of full-fledged men has hitherto prohibited androgynes from