[2]. See Part VI, chapter III.
[3]. A physician of wide experience who read the above before publication argued that in the United States, only five per cent are mildly virile. I stand unconvinced that my proportion is in error. The proportion surely differs with racial types and environment. The physician has always lived in New York City and practiced among liberal-minded, non-church, pleasure-loving people of Teutonic or Latin parentage. My own every-day associates, particularly in the village where I was brought up and which I still frequently visit, have been, almost entirely, ultra-puritan Anglo-Saxons. When I maintained their sexual temperance, the physician declared them hypocrites, whose secret practice is the same as “worldlings.” I have been intimately acquainted with hundreds of these male puritan church-devotees, and am convinced they are hypocrites solely in supposing their sexual moderation due to their own superior morals. Sex has naturally small place in their lives.
[4]. Do not confuse with anaphrodites the excessively rare men who are attracted by female beauty and manners, marry, but then desire merely Platonic relations. Such are rather cases of impotence. The genuine anaphrodite never even courts a woman.
[5]. The author has always preferred to read biography to fiction. If his life is spared, he will write an extensive work on the sexuality of noted men and women. An unusually large proportion of geniuses have been either anaphrodites or androgynes. For example, Sir Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant appear to have been anaphrodites.
[6]. I take no stock in the theory advanced by some medical writers that androgynism (generally termed male sexual inversion) is acquired and not congenital. The exceptional method of sexual expression can be acquired only by individuals congenitally on the very borderline between androgynes on the one hand and anaphrodites or mildly virile on the other. The latest proponent of the “acquired” theory, Dr. P. M. Lichtenstein, in the August, 1921, issue of MEDICAL REVIEW OF REVIEWS, suggests that masturbation in boyhood may produce in adulthood a fairie or ultra-androgyne. In my physical prime, I was a fairie of extreme type. I never masturbated as a child or as an adult because of acute horror. My own pudenda never had any part in my sexual ardor—any more than had my vermiform appendix.
Dr. Lichtenstein’s suggestion of the correction by parents of feminine predilections in small boys is futile. Those feminesque traits, when congenital, as I believe they always are in ultra-androgynes, can not be suppressed. Likewise his advice that the adolescent girl-boy seek the company of the gentle sex as a cure is as futile. In my teens, I forced myself to it, but it had not the least curative value.
Note Added in Galley: I just came across a scrap of a recent NEW YORK WORLD Sunday magazine, containing “Glands That Govern Our Lives”, name of author missing. I quote: “The not uncommon phenomena of the smooth-faced man with a feminine voice and a figure resembling that of a woman, and of the deep-voiced, hairy-faced masculine woman, are produced by abnormalities in the development of these glands.” Only in the third decade of the twentieth century is the comparatively new branch of medical science, endocrinology (the study of glands, particularly the ductless) coming forward to maintain the irresponsibility of “homosexualists” for their idiosyncrasy. It has also only just been brought into the limelight that the testicles are invigorating (as well as masculinizing) to the individual possessing them and the prime reason for man’s being physically stronger than woman. I myself, for several years after castration at the age of twenty-seven, observed a marked diminution in my stamina. (For details, see my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE.) My own testicles were abnormal judged by the fact that I, though always having intense horror of self-manustupration, suffered from acute spermatorrhea from the incidence of puberty up to castration, while I was totally devoid of the propensity natural to full-fledged adult males for emptying the seminal vesicles.
[7]. Other authorities make them more numerous. I quote from Love’s Coming-of-Age, page 125: “Dr. Grabowsky ... quotes figures ... as high as one man in every 22, while Dr. Albert Moll (Die Contraere Sexual-Empfindung, chapter 3) gives estimates varying from one in every 50 to as low as one in every 500. These figures apply to such as are exclusively of the said nature [excluding the psychic hermaphrodites. Including the latter] the estimates must be greatly higher.... Some late statistical inquiries (See Statistische Untersuchungen, Dr. M. Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1904) yield 1.5 to 2 per cent as a probable ratio.”
I myself have fixed upon the median of ratios I have read, as well as the frequency that has occurred to me as a result of a half-century’s unusually intimate mingling with all social types in many nations, having possessed, at the time I lived in the foreign nations, some speaking ability in seven foreign languages. But the frequency is greater than I have given in the text rather than less. But the extreme German estimates are too high for the United States. It is my conclusion from intimate intercourse with the natives in many countries that the frequency of bisexuality per thousand is proportional to the density of population. Nature puts a break on over-population by increasing the proportion of sterile bisexuals. When a population is regularly underfed, the number of bisexuals born appears to increase. But that is not the only factor. Another law is that when a consanguineous multifamily (a group of families) multiplies with exceptional rapidity, bisexuals are born in that family even though the food supply is undiminished. The author believes the latter to be the reason he himself was born bisexual. It was because the generic womb (i.e., those of my grandmothers for several generations) had been overtaxed.
The ratio is probably much higher among the cultured—particularly art devotees—than among the “hoi polloi.”