II. School Days.
First year: How terrible the aspect of the big brick academy! How awe-inspiring the smell of the newly varnished floor on the first day of my school life! How my heart jumped to my throat whenever I caught the cold, stern eye of the school-marm piercing through my own little self! How bold and bad and rough all the boys were! Why must I sit with them and enter by their door when I so longed to be with the gentle and soft-voiced girls?
And could I ever bring myself to see what was on the other side of the sign: “For boys only”? What right had I there? For I already recognized I was really not a boy! At that age I gloated over being a girl-boy.
There was thus provision for the comfort of the boys. There was provision for the comfort of the girls. But architects have never thought to make provision for the girl-boys!
The first week I suffered terribly rather than invade the retreat barred to all but boys. Then an unprintable experience right at my desk afforded the room a good laugh and sent me home for dry clothing. I now preferred the horror of the retreat to being laughed at and sent home. But I made a virtue of haste and watched for a moment when no other boy was out.
Second year: I sat on a rear seat with a boy whom I stared at and touched because of the softness and radiance of his hair, the rich red of his cheeks, |Sexual Precocity.| and his sturdy build. Now and then we kissed when no one was looking. But once a loud smack reverberated just after the near-sighted school-marm had requested such stillness that one could hear a pin drop. As she had never been kissed by a person of the opposite sex, she considered a smack the unpardonable sin. My hero-boy took his whipping with a cynical smile. But I wept for a half-hour.
Third year: I was caught in an immeasurably worse impropriety[[16]] under a desk. The teacher thought my parents ought to know. Violently angry, my father hammered my body with the heel of a boot. In a dozen years, not one of my numerous brothers and sisters (although I was the only goody-goody one) suffered such a thrashing. All the rest of my home life, father treated me the worst of all, notwithstanding I far excelled in school-work. What a trial to have a girl-boy son? Why had I ever been born? Subsequently there existed a lifelong coolness between father and me.
Fourth year: [A typical spring afternoon.] After school, the west playground was thronged with boys. I alone hastened directly to the street, embarrassed as a little girl alone with two hundred boys. One calls out: “Ralph, hurry to the girls’ yard where you belong!” Another: “Ralph, your legs are as shapely as a girl’s. You would make a good-looking girl!” A third throws his arms around me and exclaims: “Kissing you is as good as kissing a girl!”
My embarrassment prevented my relishing these attentions at the moment. But I always gloated over them after I got to bed.
Nature Indicated Rearing as a Girl.
I had not quite reached the gate when a ball rolled to my feet and the players shouted for it. With beet-red face on account of what I knew would be said, I gave the ball an awkward toss. “Hah hah hah! You throw just like a girl! Miss Nancy!”
Often I went around Robin Hood’s barn to avoid this particular embarrassment.
Arrived in the girls’ yard, I felt as if freed from captivity and in my proper element. Shyness and fright gave way to gleefulness. Moreover, I cared only for the less strenuous games of the gentle sex.
Several boys mounted the high fence in order to tease me. “Ralph, I promise you my sister’s doll carriage to push to school!”... “Heigh, Miss Werther, have you finished the mitten I saw you knitting?”... “Say, Ralph, give me a kiss, will you?”
While with girls, I liked nothing better than such bantering. I out-girled them in our reaction to the boys’ teasing. We finally succeeded in provoking the boys to chase us—my wish all along. To be chased by boys was the highest of childhood’s pleasures.
I was always the ringleader of my girl clique, never reflecting on its unnaturalness. They never regarded me as a normal boy—only a “girl-boy.” We would even discuss our boy favorites.
Fifth year: My parents thought that if I were shut up closely with boys and away from even the sight of girls, I would be cured of my effeminacy. Thus my fifth to eleventh years of school life were staged at a boys’ “prep” several miles from my home village and numbering about a hundred students. But I was only a day-pupil except during my senior year.
Childhood Female-Impersonation.
The first week, it was an ordeal on a par with being forced into breeches. I was in a state of chronic fright. When addressed, my reply was inaudible six feet away. But after becoming well acquainted with class-mates, I have seated myself on their laps right in the schoolroom. For they appeared demigods.
They would run a hand up my arm. “Your skin is softer than velvet. And your pencils look as if you had chewed them off with your teeth. And what makes you scream when a fellow merely touches you? Ralph, you certainly ought to have been born a girl! You will never make a man!”
On holidays I would run off to the house of a girl friend. With several of the gentle sex, I would play hide-and-seek in remote nooks, as hay-mows. Later I would exchange clothing with one, and we would seek boy acquaintances that I might display my skill in female-impersonation.
Adult intimates would point the finger of scorn in vain. To pass life as far as possible like a girl was the very essence of existence, for which I was willing to sacrifice everything else.
The instinctive manner of coasting is a criterion of psychic sex. Every boy of my set, excepting myself, rode bellyflops—too strenuous for the soft-muscled and timid girls. As I possessed their physical and psychic softness, I also coasted upright.
In ascending the hill, I kept with the girls. I enjoyed talking about only their interests. As the boys passed, they would call out: “Girl-boy! Mollie Coddle!”
One afternoon, two snow forts were built fifty feet apart. All the boys, excepting myself, took their stand |Outlook on Life at Eleven.| bravely behind the breastworks and rained snowballs on the defenders of the opposite fort. The girls were almost prostrate in the deep snow behind—out of danger of being hit in the face—packing snowballs for the throwers. And I, GIRL-BOYWISE, did as they, the eternal impropriety never dawning on me.
But one of the girls cried out: “Why are you not throwing snowballs with the boys? Afraid of getting hit, are you? Why don’t you put on petticoats?”
After I retired that night, I had not yet recovered from my speechless chagrin. “Why was it that I was not taking a boy’s place in life? Why did I sit upright when coasting? Why did I feel more at home in girls’ attire? Why did the boys tease me just as they did the girls? Could it be that I was a girl imprisoned in the body of a boy?
“How could I face manhood? Are men under compulsion to go and vote? But how could I push my way into the crowd of rough men always hanging [at that period] around the polling places?
“How terrible to be a boy! Couldn’t I take papa’s razor and in a minute rid myself of the excrescence? A razor ought to be sharp enough to do the job! O God, change my body this moment by a miracle! Turn me into a girl!” I sobbed.
One day, being a goody-goody, I had felt it my duty to tell the teacher on a mischievous boy. As I left the school for my train, I was seized violently. “If you were a big, strong fellow like us, we would give you a good thrashing! We’ll only see if we can lift you off the ground by your hair. The more you cry, the better we like it. Keep your hands down! |Girl-Boys’ Reasons for Suicide.| Slap! Slap! Slap! And stop carrying your books on your arm like a girl!”
When they let go their grip, I started off on a run, only one boy pursuing and shouting out threats. I shall now reveal the girl-boy’s patented secret for getting out of a predicament. I sprinted to the porch of the first house, gave the door-bell several violent jerks, and shrieked for help.
Sixth year: I was absorbed in fashioning a doll’s dress. An older sister angrily exclaimed: “Why don’t you get out on the ball-field like all other boys? I hate effeminate boys! Mother, I’m afraid Ralph is not normal!”
At the moment I felt ashamed ever to look my disgusted sister in the face again. So ashamed that I wanted to kill myself. (One of my girl-boy playmates, because bitterly persecuted on account of his effeminacy, actually committed suicide at twelve by swallowing rat poison.) “I not normal? What did my sister mean? Could she have had in mind my queer habit of sitting on the boys’ laps? I was the only boy that acted so queerly. I had not realized it could be described as ‘abnormal.’”
On another occasion, I was, with two brothers, skirting a creek on the way to the swimming-hole. We came to a row of stepping-stones. My brothers trotted across several times. But I lacked the courage even to set foot on the first.
We found several “shavers” in the swimming-hole. My two brothers joined them. But I liked only to recline on the bank and feast my eyes. I would as soon have stripped before boys as would a little girl. |“I Want to Die!”| I only got a sight of the swimming-hole because I had brothers.
For the first time it occurred to a “shaver” to strip and duck me. My brothers were ashamed of my being a girl-boy and thought it would contribute toward making a man of me.
“Stop your screeching, Ralph! You’ve got to be stripped so we can see if you are a real boy! Stop your scratching, or we’ll give you a black eye!... Now let’s dip him under to stop his yelling!... You can’t come around the swimming-hole any more unless you get into the water with the rest of us!... Cry-baby! Cry-baby! You’re a hopeless case!... Clear out of here!”
I half-way dressed and ran off in terror. Their driving home the fact that I was a hopeless sexual cripple brought on such melancholia as I had never before experienced. I repeatedly blubbered out as I ran: “I want to die! I want to die!”
How I Came to Be a Female-Impersonator.