The girl-boy with diffused minor abnormality in physical structure, consisting in approach to the feminine type, is rather a female who has, along with some other male structures, developed testicles and penis in place of the usual ovaries and cunnus. Here it is not so much a case of a female brain in a male body, but of the female brain in a female body with various abnormal developments along the line of male structure. A girl-boy is sometimes even physically perhaps more a female than a male, although the primary sexual determinants and some of the secondary sexual characters are those of the male sex.
Sex Psychical Rather Than Physical.
In a manner similar to that described by Kurella, the author believes the invert is a transitional form between the complete male or the complete female and the sexually undifferentiated homo seen in the early fœtus.
Practically it is all right, but medico-legally it is wrong, to make the genitals the universal criterion in the determination of sex. Medico-legally, sex should be determined by the psychical constitution rather than by the physical form. There are thousands of physical females who feel themselves to be men and have the mental traits of men, and there are thousands of physical males who feel themselves to be women and have the mental traits of a woman. Should any blame be attached to such individuals when they conduct themselves according to their psychical sex? The writer, much against his will, was brought up as a boy, and after becoming adult continued in every-day life to identify himself with the male sex because of his beard and masculine voice, and because of the advantages of passing as a male; but in spite of himself he was occasionally compelled to go off on a female-impersonation spree.
Men call the invert’s instincts vice. The invert has just as much reason for calling the normal man’s instincts vice when they are not exercised solely in order to create a new human being. It is only a case of the pot calling the kettle black. In the eyes of the Supreme Being, with whom innate and unreasoning disgust is not a factor, the instincts of the normal man and of the invert are on a par morally and æsthetically. There is no ground for the charge that the passive invert’s practices are aimed at the very existence of the race. In the first place, Nature made him psychically impotent from birth. In the second place, his practices could not be spread by example. They are regarded by all normally constituted males with such disgust and aversion that practically no one would stoop to them except those born with the peculiar cravings. And why place a heavy penalty on one particular practice which might prevent a few births, and give large liberty to other practices with a hundred and a thousand fold more power to diminish the birth rate? The author was addicted to sensuality more than the vast majority of inverts. Nevertheless, if he had never yielded to instinct, there would not be today a single human being more in the world than there are. None of his intimates were given to begetting children, at least on the threshold of manhood, which was the age at which they consorted with him.
Ethics of Inversion.
The invert’s harmless instinctive sexual conduct (generally fellatio, seldom pædicatio) is today regarded as a felony almost throughout Christendom. France, Italy, and Holland are the only Christian nations which have entirely repealed the laws enacted against these unfortunates during the Dark Ages. Old English law provided that the guilty one be burnt alive, while other statutes of the same law condemned him to be buried alive. In the reign of Richard III, he was hanged. The death penalty was not abolished until after the reign of George IV. At the present time in England, the maximum penalty is penal servitude for life, and the minimum, ten years imprisonment. In the United States the penalty is from five to twenty years imprisonment. Is it not unjust to keep on the statute books these laws against an unfortunate and harmless class?
Legal Penalties.
I am here reminded of two conferences with Mr. Anthony Comstock, because part of his business while alive was that of hunting down inverts and haling them off to prison. By the irony of fate, I was during my college days nicknamed after this gentleman because on hearing an obscene remark by a fellow student, my features involuntarily expressed shock and disapproval, probably due to my having the mind of a woman. But in 1900, as soon as I had this autobiography ready for publication, I submitted it to Mr. Comstock in order to ascertain whether it could be circulated. He was then a Post-Office Department inspector, with power to prosecute for shipping “obscene” matter by common carrier. He read considerable of the manuscript of this book, and stated on handing it back that he would have “destroyed” it but for the fact that I impressed him “as a person not having any evil intent.”