Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/33

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF AN
ANDROGYNE

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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.

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,

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