Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/20

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The Sexual The Worst Crippling.

The problem of the bisexual girl-boy or androgyne has been presented for the learned professions in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Riddle of the Underworld. But to accomplish my three aims, it is necessary that the general reader have instilled into his mind that sexual intermediates are not to blame for their cross-sex idiosyncrasies. Such knowledge could not besmirch the soul of the general reader, but only benefit him morally.

In the present work I have a message for the general reader such as, in nearly every individual case, has never yet reached him. My God-given mission is to be one of the first to cry: "Child of English culture,[1] reflect a moment, and ask yourself whether you are at last, in this the most enlightened century of man's existence, willing to grant justice and humane treatment to the androgyne and gynander? Do you still insist that these sexual cripples continue to suffer physical and mental torture for another century because your own pleasure bulks too large for you to hear and bear the truth about the despairing cross-sexed?

Why should the Christian and the Jew have always regarded as the one unpardonable sin the union in one human body of the distinctive physical and psychic earmarks of the two recognized sexes? Why should they have pitied and assisted the club-footed and the deaf-mute, but always endeavored to grind sexual cripples to powder under their heels?

There is indeed no worse crippling than the sexual. This is because sex, with all that it implies, is

  1. Continental European civilizations are, on this subject, a half-century ahead of Anglo-American.