Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/33

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Androgynes.
15

world of woe. Belief in St. Paul's inerrancy makes it impossible to reconcile Christian ethics with the incontrovertible teachings of Nature. While, in respect to value to the human race, I give St. Paul's epistles first place among all published documents (the woe they have occasioned being, a thousand times over, outweighed by the light they have given man on the greatest questions that puzzle his brain) I must, particularly because of their false sex doctrines, deny their inerrancy. If inerrant, the human race ought to have ceased existence eighteen hundred years ago.

Jesus made no such blunders in his sex teaching. He was the only biblical teacher apparently to recognize the existence of androgynes without thundering against them. As "eunuchs from their mother's womb," he may of course have had in mind only anaphrodites. But apparently he was aware of the existence of androgynes, St. John the Divine, apparently his favorite disciple, having possessed the earmarks, particularly "softness" of disposition.

(5) Androgynes are the eddies along the banks of the masculine river. Their movement is retrograde. They are instances of arrest of development. In the early fœtus sex is not apparent. Only later does differentiation begin. In more than ninety-nine out of a hundred humans, it is completed at puberty. But the individual androgyne or gynander remains, down to death, to a greater or less degree bisexual. Just as a mule is part horse and part donkey, so an androgyne or gynander is part man and part woman. To quote from Krafft Ebing: "They [androgynes] are neither man nor woman: a mixture of both; with secondary