Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/13

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Introduction

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When, in 1918, I agreed to publish the author's Autobiography of an Androgyne, I did so because persuaded that androgynism was not sufficiently understood and that therefore androgynes were unjustly made to suffer.

Owing to the subject matter, or rather on account of the way in which it was presented by the author, I was obliged to restrict the sale of the book to physicians, lawyers, legislators, psychologists, and sociologists.

The sale of the book, while not as large as it ought to have been, showed however that the interest of the professional man could be awakened, and he be made to realize that the androgyne is no more to be punished for his harmless sexual transgressions than a congenital physical cripple for the latter's unaesthetic physique.

Hardly had the Autobiography of an Androgyne been published, when the author (who, it must be understood, belongs to that despised class of sexual cripples) started, to use his own words, "to peddle the script" of The Female-Impersonators around to general book publishers, and continued to do so for two years, until ten publishers had returned it to him as unsuited for general circulation. It must be understood that the author wrote The Female-Impersonators for the general reader as

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