Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/19

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Introduction.
vii

feels himself as a female, and therefore is always attracted towards men and would rather be in their society than in the society of females, who are sexually repulsive to him. This Tidy evidently failed to clearly understand.

This then is my contention, that homosexuality is either an acquired vice, that is to say a habit, or an acquired mental aberration, that is to say, insanity, or congenital; and then it is that a human being is born with a body with sexual organs all those of the male, yet most likely with a body which shows certain earmarks of the female, and with a soul nearly all female, but certainly entirely female in regard to the sex question. Such a person is a homosexualist, because he feels like a woman and to him all male persons belong to the opposite sex. He is not a roué, who has developed homosexuality as a vice, but he is born an androgyne, whom we can recognize in his manners and mannerisms; a male person with female ways.

If then the Bible already speaks of homosexual practices and warns against the idolatrous homosexual practices devoted to Moloch and Bal Phegor; if already Juvenal and Martial and Cornelius Nepos describe homosexuality, were it not about time that something were done to change the existing laws?

Hofman, in his Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Medizin, published in 1884, draws attention to the fact that passive pederasts are generally of remarkable femininity, and quotes Brouardel as also remarking that this female appearance, these female actions and these female habits, likes and dislikes are generally congenital.

Tidy also, in his work on Legal Medicine, published in