Part 2

My own is not an isolated case. Among most races and in all ages of the world, one individual out of about every three hundred physical males—on a conservative estimate—is by birth predominantly female psychically. I merely furnish an extreme case of passive inversion, and my life experience has simply been unusually varied and noteworthy.

The author trusts that every medical man, every lawyer, and every other friend of science who reads this autobiography will thereby be moved to say a kind word for any of the despised and oppressed stepchildren of Nature—the sexually abnormal by birth—who may happen to be within his field of activity.

THE AUTHOR

April, 1918.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

OF AN

ANDROGYNE

_Hermaphroditos._

The fusion in one human being of the distinctive physical and mental characteristics of the two sexes has from antiquity proved to be a phenomenon interesting to mankind. In some of the great museums of the world can still be seen examples of the classical statue of _Hermaphroditos_, with complete primary male sexual determinants and no trace of female, but with female secondary determinants. The work now in the hands of the reader portrays the inner history and the life experience of such a specimen of the _genus homo_.

[Sidenote: _“Androgyne” Defined._]

An “hermaphrodite,” according to the original Greek signification of this term, was not an individual—in the modern sense—having both the male and the female organs of reproduction in whole or in part, or a curious fusion of the two, but only those of the male. In other respects, however, the bodily form was that of a female. The hermaphrodite was thus, according to the Greeks, a female with male genitals. Because modern usage has diverted the term “hermaphrodite” to a different signification, the word “androgyne” has come into use to denote an individual with male genitals, but whose physical structure otherwise, whose psychical constitution, and _vita sexualis_ approach the female type.

Androgynes have of course existed in all ages of history and among all races. In Greek and Latin authors there are many references to them, but these references are not always understood except by the few scholars who are themselves androgynes or at least passive sexual inverts. About the middle of the 16th century, the celebrated theologian Beza more clearly wrote: “What shall I say of these vile and stinking _androgynes_, that is to say, these men-women, with their curled locks, their crisped and frizzled hair?”[1] As is evident in this passage, these men-women, because misunderstood, have been held in great abomination both in the middle ages and in modern times, but the prejudice against them was not so extreme in antiquity, and a cultured citizen having this nature did not then lose caste on this account.

Footnote 1:

Harmar’s translation of Beza, page 173.

But until Krafft-Ebing published his epoch-making work, _Psychopathia Sexualis_, in the last decade of the 19th century, European and American medical science was either practically ignorant of or else ignored the existence of androgynism. But that author treated principally of other unusual sexual phenomena. Very little of androgynism came under his observation. I quote from page 389 of the English translation of the 12th edition of his work: “There is yet wanting a sufficient record of cases belonging to this interesting group of women in masculine attire with masculine genitals.”

[Sidenote: _“Fairie” Defined._]

The present work discloses not only the life of an androgyne _per se_, but that of a “fairie” or “petit-jesus,” the life of which rare human “sport” (in the biological sense) your author was apparently also predestined to live out in a way immeasurably more varied than falls to the lot of the ordinary fairie, having had a limited experience in this vocation in Berlin and Paris and other great European cities, in addition to his extensive experience in New York.

The “fairie” is a youthful androgyne or other passive invert (for they are perhaps not all members of the extreme class of androgynes) whom natural predestination or other circumstances led to adopt the profession of the fille de joie. The term “fairie” is widely used in the United States by those who are in touch with the underworld. It probably originated on sailing vessels of olden times when voyages often lasted for months. While the crew was either actually or prospectively suffering acutely from the absence of the female of the species, one of their number would unexpectedly betray an inclination to supply her place. Looked upon as a fairy gift or godsend, such individual would be referred to as “the fairy.” As the author is one of the first users of the printed word in this derived sense, he has elected to adopt a distinctive spelling.

It is hardly necessary to explain that the sacrilegious term, “petit-jesus,” commonly used in France, means “a little Jesus.” This term would naturally be applied to youthful pathics by the irreverent because being psychically female, they are likely to be “saintly” or “goody-goodies,” as were both your author as a youth, and practically all the youthful pathics he has known.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Types of Hermaphrodism._]

Contrary to the ordinary view, there exists, in the human race, no sharp dividing line between the sexes, just as there exists none between the vegetable and the animal kingdoms. The two sexes gradually merge into each other. Between the complete physical and psychical man and the similarly complete woman, there are innumerable stages of transitional individuals. As there are organisms which the novice would be puzzled to classify as animal or vegetable, so there are human beings who have a just claim to be classed with the sex other than that with which they are commonly classed. Some examples of these transitional individuals are the psychical hermaphrodite, the pseudo-hermaphrodite, the mujerado of the Mexican Indians, the man-woman of East India, and the virago or amazon, as well as the fairie, already mentioned.

Besides the fact of the existence of the decidedly hermaphroditic or androgynous types named, there exists a continuous scale of mental sexuality along which all human beings might be arranged, the poles of which are thorough masculinity and thorough femininity, respectively. At the masculine pole stand the warrior, the blue-jacket, the pugilist, etc., and it was only such, the tremendously virile, who possess no gentle or feminine traits at all, to whom your author was ordinarily attracted. Further down the male side of the scale, after the man of adventure and sport, come, successively, the stevedore and his like, the manual laborer, and the merchant, and still lower, the scholar, which class possesses in general only a comparatively low degree of masculinity and virility. Partaking largely of the feminine type of mind are the male dress-maker and milliner, and the dilettante.

[Sidenote: _Scalæ Sexuales._]

Those at the extremity of the male side of the scale, as the volunteer soldier and sailor, are the most strongly inclined to venery, as a general rule. This is your author’s conclusion after intimate experience with 800 young men, of whom at least one-half belonged to the occupations just designated. He concludes further from his experience that nearly all who associate with a fairie belong to this “tremendously virile” class. It is also probably true that congenital active pederasts belong chiefly to this class. The individuals near the lower end of the male side of the scale, as the college professor, are as a rule continent by birth, and fathers of few children, while those at the lower end, as the male milliner and the dilettante, are likely to be sexual inverts. Your author happens to be a pronounced specimen of the dilettante.

At the beginning of the feminine side of the scale, and likely also to be inverts, stand the woman soldier (surreptitious), the woman marksman, and the woman gymnast. Lower down stands the ordinary _mater familias_, entirely normal sexually and completely satisfied with monandry. The _fille de joie_ stands still lower, and is as a rule more intensely feminine and childlike than the _mater familias_. Many are also naturally polyandrous. At the feminine pole we find the helpless cry-baby species of woman. The author aspired to be of this type, and always, when impersonating a woman, acted out this type.

[Sidenote: _Author’s Feminine Characteristics._]

As already indicated, the participation of the transitional individuals in the characters of the two sexes varies in all degrees. There may be simply a union of the perfect body of one sex with the susceptibility to such sexual charms as ordinarily attract the other sex alone, or with the mental traits of the other sex. Or the individual may possess the male genitals, but be beardless, or else possess mammary glands, broad pelvis, and sacral dimples; or possessing the female genitals, have a rudimentary moustache, or else meagrely developed breasts, narrow pelvis, etc. Instances have been known of human beings with an ovary on one side of the body and a testicle on the other, and of males who were able to suckle infants.

As to my own feminine characteristics, I have been told by intimate associates from boyhood down to my middle forties—when this book goes to press—that I markedly resemble a female physically, besides having instinctive gestures, poses, and habits that are characteristically feminine. My schoolmates said that I would make a good-looking girl and that kissing me was “as good as kissing a girl.” When I was fourteen, one of them remarked that my calves were “as shapely as those of a girl.” My associates in college have remarked how much I was like a woman in form and manners, though they never showed evidence of a suspicion that I might be an invert. They were probably ignorant of the existence of this human sport. “He blushes like a woman,” was said of me. Later, in my fairie days, my associates would remark that my hands felt like a woman’s, and that my skin in general was as soft as a woman’s. They said that my voice, especially when singing, had a feminine timbre. The voice is one of the chief criteria by which to determine abnormal sexuality. I fancy that I can diagnose a man sexually simply by hearing him sing. For example, a male invert, as well as the closely related “eunuch by birth” or anaphrodite, is likely to sing a tenor which is hardly distinguishable from an alto.

[Sidenote: _Femininity Betrayed in Voice._]

I have been told that my speaking voice is a very uncommon one, having the “fulness of a woman’s voice,” and that it often “breaks and changes, sometimes in the middle of a sentence; from being masculine, it suddenly changes timbre and becomes decidedly feminine.” I have myself observed sometimes when in conversation with a young man with whom I was in love that my voice would involuntarily change from a bass to a treble. My voice has also been described as “soothing, sentimental-sounding, gushing, bland, and caressing.” I have been told that when I talk, involuntary—and to myself unconscious—movements of the lips take place not necessary for articulation, and that the same movements take place occasionally even when I am not talking.

Barbers have remarked that my hair is “literally as fine as silk,” that they had “never seen it so fine in any other man.” I believe this to be a general peculiarity of androgynes, who also have a predilection for wearing the hair rather long because they think it contributes to their own good looks, while abhorring long hair in a normal male.

[Sidenote: _Femininity—Physical and Psychical._]

I have the feminine slope of shoulders and the feminine angle of arm. Pelvis is broad and limbs loosely hung, as in a woman, and fingers and hands rather feminine in their general fineness of texture, comparative absence of hair, absence of prominent bones and veins, and the softness and pleasing tint of skin.

Features are small like a woman’s, but nose, lips, and ears large in proportion, indicating sensuality. I possess mammary glands and sacral dimples. While my breasts are as large as in some women, the nipples are small, even for a man. I am small-boned, of delicate build, and my muscular system is soft. An anatomist of national reputation who gave me a physical examination at the age of thirty-three, pronounced approximately one-third the exterior lines of my body those of the female, and remarked that any one viewing my naked form from the rear and not knowing my sex, would pronounce me a female.

I was said not to “reason like a man, that is, logically”; to be “fussy and inclined to peevishness”; and to have “great patience for minute details.”

I was said to throw a ball, drive a nail, etc., “just like a girl.” A lead pencil sharpened by me looks as if I had chewed it off with my teeth. I have always had the feminine instinct of screaming at slight provocation. When coasting as a child, I always sat upright after the manner of girls. In snowball fights, in which the girls packed the snowballs behind the barrier and the boys exposed themselves in throwing, I instinctively took my place with the girls, the eternal lack of fitness never dawning upon me.

[Sidenote: _General Physical Traits._]

I might mention here some further characteristics which are not peculiarly feminine. I am below the average stature for a man, and unusually light for my volume, weighing only 110 pounds stripped from the age of nineteen to twenty-five, after I had attained my maximum height of five feet five inches. My back is much arched. Penis is below the average size, but entirely normal. Testicles were pronounced of normal appearance by the surgeon who castrated me at the age of twenty-eight.

I am of the brunette type. At the age of eighteen, the growth of hair on my body and limbs became more luxuriant than on the average male, but after the first shaving off of all this hair in my early fairie days, I continued to be far less hairy than the average man even after I ceased the practice of body-shaving.

My lips are a deep red, and my complexion gives the appearance of good health. My eyes are bistre-brown. I have been told that I look like a woman around the eyes, and when youthful have been complimented on their beauty, and my general appearance pronounced not unprepossessing. I have been pursued by women, and have received three proposals of marriage. In general the women who have seemed to be attracted toward me have been a few years older than myself. Havelock Ellis has said (“Sexual Inversion,” page 140) that “women seem with special frequency to fall in love with disguised persons of their own sex.” Your author is really a woman whom Nature disguised as a man.

[Sidenote: _Childlikeness._]

As late as my middle forties my “childlike face” has been commented upon, and even more my “decidedly childlike manner.” I have been told that my “face wears expressions not ordinarily seen on persons of [my] age,” that in the office my childishness is a constant source of mirth with my business associates, even those who have not had the faintest idea that I am sexually abnormal and even addicted to fellatio, and that they watch me while I am working because of my childlike way of doing things and my childlike expression. According to one of my business-associate informants, I still had in my middle thirties “the real childlike naiveté.” The term “grown-up child” has also been affectionately applied to me by my office associates down to my middle forties, and they have said that teasing me was “just like teasing a child.” All through my life, even down to my middle forties, when this book goes to press, my male school or business associates—most of whom have not even suspected my inversion—have taken delight in teasing me as older children a younger child, or as brothers tease their sisters, and I generally liked to be thus teased.

My office associates in a “provincial” city in my middle thirties were far more puritanical and unsophisticated than those in New York City of my middle forties, and never gave any evidence that they even knew of the existence of fairies. But those of the later period showed such knowledge, and several times made remarks to me indicating their suspicions about myself, but I always sought to counteract them. The knowledge of unusual sexual phenomena is apparently far more widespread in a great cosmopolitan center like New York than in a “provincial” city.

[Sidenote: _Infantilism._]

Further, all my life down to my early thirties, my decidedly virile associates in school and business have babied me. Indeed in some respects I have never ceased to be a baby mentally. I have wept and sobbed a great deal all my life. Up to my early thirties, I yearned to be called “Baby” by decidedly virile males, and to have them treat me as a baby and a weakling. All through my open career as a fairie, I conducted myself with intimates in the same way as a baby of two years towards its mother. Whenever I have seen an infant nursing, I have been seized with a desire for fellatio cum viro of about my own age, and have sometimes even experienced an attack of babyish actions, as panting or cooing in satisfaction, or swayed the head or other parts of the body, a sort of natural graceful dance of these parts. I seem to have retained many of the instincts of the babe which are normally outgrown; only these instincts—the feeling of dependence, the looking for protection, the yearning to be held in the arms and fellatio (in its etymological sense)—were, after the age of four, no longer directed to the mother, but to stalwart males around my own age.

I have aged slowly, successfully passing for twenty-four as a fairie after I had reached thirty-one, and for twenty-nine in my middle forties. When I was thirty-two, a lady of forty who did not know my age remarked of me: “Why he is only a boy!” When I was forty-two, a business associate of rather long-standing and only twenty-six years of age remarked that he had “never met any one else so abnormal as [myself] in respect to the discrepancy between apparent and actual age.” I have sometimes thought of myself as “the boy who never grew to be a man.” Before reaching my fortieth year, it was my ambition to preserve my youth indefinitely. In my middle forties business associates have asked me for the recipe for perennial youth. Before reaching my fortieth year, possibly no other male was so horrified as myself at the thought of waning youth and approaching old age. But now (1918), in my middle forties, I am reconciled to growing old.

[Sidenote: _Perennial Youth—Æstheticism._]

I am rather vain, and have been guilty of contemplating my reflection in a mirror. Prior to my middle forties I was of a bashful disposition and lacked self-confidence, except when following out my fairie instincts. Down to my middle forties I have been unusually fond of small animals as pets and have covered their coats with kisses. I likewise am unusually fond of petting children.

I am devoid of practically all interest in sport. In place of this interest, I happen to be an æsthete. My home is an art gallery, with more art objects per cubic foot than I have heard to exist anywhere else outside an art gallery or shop. Few are better endowed than myself in respect to the capacity for deriving pleasure from beauty in art and nature.

[Sidenote: _Polyglottism._]

Almost every department of human knowledge interests me. I like psychology, sociology, economics, and history least of all, and languages and philology most of all. Metaphysics and theology also stand high in my regard, while the natural sciences occupy a middle position.

The common union of sexual inversion and the aptitude of the linguist has been commented upon by medical writers. I turned out to be perhaps the best linguist of my college class. From childhood I have had a craze for the acquisition of foreign languages. I speak two with considerable fluency, and when having frequent occasion to use them, can carry on a conversation in two others. Besides these four, I have read quite extensively in the original the literature of about a dozen foreign tongues. For more than a decade, I devoted an average of at least ten hours a week to reading in these numerous foreign languages.

* * * * *

Why am I a sexual invert? I have an explanation to offer, which is perhaps more fanciful than scientific. Is there not a difference between the “protoplasm” or cellular tissue of males and of females, which is the ground of the difference in the physical and psychical development of the sexes? Must there not be in the protoplasm of males a specific male “germ” or characteristic, and in the protoplasm of females a different germ, which are the ground of the opposite development of the sexes? Just as we know by the taste that the protoplasm of the muscle of an ox is differently constituted from that of a sheep, likewise must not that of the male and female homo differ, although in less degree? If through a surgical operation the breast from a male infant could be grafted in the proper place on a female infant, and the breast from a female infant on a male infant, the two individuals, as they became adult, would develop physically along the lines of his or her own sex except the grafted breast. That of the girl would remain flat, that of the boy would develop a mammary gland and become elevated into a mons. They each have on them a patch of the tissue of the opposite sex. In the passive invert there may exist one or more such patches from birth.

[Sidenote: _Cause of Inversion._]

According to the author’s theory,—whether any individual shall be a male or a female depends on the result of a battle in the embryo between the female corpuscles or germs of the egg and the male of the spermatozoa. From some cause, perhaps the relative state of vitality of the secretory sexual glands at the time of the formation of the particular egg and spermatozoon, either the female germs or the male germs happen to be the more vigorous, and determine the sex of the unborn. If the fœtus develops into a female, it is because the female germs have devoured the male. For some reason, in exceptional cases, the more vigorous set of cells have not succeeded in devouring the other set entirely, and both kinds coexist in different parts of the same individual throughout his existence. In a male there may be only a single patch of female tissue—that is, tissue dominated in its development by the presence of the female bacteria—about the cheeks and neck, rendering him beardless, but with masculine habits of mind and the male sexual instinct. To constitute a passive invert, the brain, the physical basis of the psychical nature, must be composed of female tissue, must be a “female brain.”

[Sidenote: _Female Brain in Male Body._]