Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/96

74 or cheeks! Only a trifling male stigma! How much more heart-rending for a mademoiselle to possess the male physique to such an extent that even all physicians (except a handful of sexologists) with their present lack of knowledge—or rather their closing their eyes to all evidence—would declare her a male, and prescribe that she should in life fill the latter role.

Such was my chronic burden almost throughout my teens. (Subsequently, with the exception of brief spells of melancholia, I became reconciled to my fate.) And such is the burden imposed by Nature on one youth out of every three hundred in every social set of every country in the world. But because of my intellectuality, high-class environment, and extreme androgynism, my grief was exceptionally intense. I do not believe the mildly androgynous are melancholy during their teens. They have not yet become conscious that they are abnormal.

My chronic lamentation during my seventeenth to nineteenth years was: "Miserable wretch! Miserable wretch! Miserable wretch! That's all I am! I was born with a deformed nature, despicable in the eyes of all people! I am a soft effeminate youth who is wanted nowhere! I am ashamed to look any one in the face! I feel like putting an end to my life, or else losing myself, to all who know who I am, in a distant city where I could live according to my queer nature. I have nothing to live for! I may be disgraced, disgrace my family, be compelled to flee, be disowned by my parents, be cursed and be despised throughout the land!"

An older sister frequently vented her spite on me because of her disgust at my effeminacy. The Sunday