Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/21

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Author's Trilogy.
3

the principal physiological factor in life. Any abnormality of sex is truly the greatest of tragedies.

Reader, what would have been your own attitude on this question if God had created you, or your son or daughter, a sexual intermediate, instead of some stranger about whose banishment, suicide, or murder you have read in the paper? Would you have driven the ill-starred son or daughter from home, and henceforth treated them as dead? Or would you, when their dead body was fished out of the river, be able to feel pity as did a father I read about in a New York paper, who exclaimed at sight of it: "Poor Jimmie! How you must have suffered!"[1]

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My first three books on sexology form a trilogy. They together set forth all phases of the life experience of a bisexual university "man." To only a trifling extent do they overlap. Thus the scientist wishing a full account of my unique life experience must read the entire trilogy. For I was predestined to an unusual role in the great drama we call "life." I was brought into the world as one of the rare humans who possess a strong claim, on anatomic grounds as well as psychic, to membership in both the recognized sexes. I was foreordained to live part of my life as man and part as woman.

The first of the trilogy, the Autobiography of an Androgyne, was published in January, 1919. In the following June, I began a supplement, The Female-Impersonators. Before September, I began to submit it to publishers. But they refused to do anything

  1. See Part VI, chapter III.