One presumed male out of every three hundred belongs to the third sex, strictly speaking. That is, the ultra-androgynes—the pseudo-men who possess only undersized and non-functional male pudenda, whose body otherwise tends toward feminesqueness, and whose psyche, predilections, tastes, gestures, and postures remind one of a female.
The third sex is a commonplace topic in the Underworld, which comprises about one-tenth the population of “Christian” lands. The Underworlders, however, generally fail to understand the cause of the effeminacy. The nine-tenths of the unlearned who have never entered a more immoral place than a “movie” theatre are almost entirely ignorant of the third sex. What hazy ideas they have are criminally incorrect. And except for a handful of sexologists, |Benighted Leaders of Thought.| the learned still cling to views handed down from the Dark Ages.
In the seventeenth century, when a cyclone demolished a hamlet or an epidemic broke out, a council of physicians, lawyers, and clergymen was called to determine which semi-bearded old hag had wished the catastrophe upon the community. After prayer for divine guidance and an exhortation by a parson that the Bible taught that witches ought to be ferreted out, the high-brows would seek to determine who of the several bags of bone known to all of them presented the most loathsome appearance, and who should therefore be burned at the stake as the witch responsible for the catastrophe—as the necessary human sacrifice to appease the anger of the Unseen Powers. For even down to the twentieth century there survives in Christendom the pagan superstition of the necessity of a human sacrifice now and then.
But in the twentieth century, leaders of thought have evolved from the belief in witchcraft. They must look elsewhere than to semi-bearded hags for their sacrificial victims on whom to load the sins of mankind, and the blame for the decline and fall of nations. Since, next to hags, they consider sexual cripples as the most loathsome of humans, they make the latter the scape-goats of present-day society. While they no longer burn them at the stake or bury them alive (as provided in old European law) they are permitted by twentieth century statutes to imprison inoffensive androgynes for twenty years. And these archaic statutes are still frequently enforced. Only a few months ago I read of a Boston clergyman who was sentenced to prison on the testimony of a young ex-soldier. |Banishment of Androgynes.| But to-day these statutes serve chiefly as ground for extensive blackmail of Nature’s step-children, hardly one of whom, if belonging to the middle or upper class, but has had to pay out considerable sums, occasionally running into the thousands.
Instead of imprisonment, public opinion has generally substituted banishment of the disclosed androgyne forever from all he loves.
During the few months of composing this book, the New York papers have told of the abrupt flight to parts unknown of three intellectual leaders in their communities, two just over the city line and the third within a hundred miles. They had to flee, not because they had done the least real harm (all three were pastors of churches) but because of the mediæval ignorance and bitter hatred that their communities immediately manifested toward a “man” (reputedly) all of a sudden disclosed to be a “monster” (though in reality a harmless and pitiable sexual cripple). The populace, ignorant that he had probably practiced a thousand times more self-denial than any one of themselves, but had at last been able to withstand Nature’s demands no longer, chased him out of his community for good and all with the feeling that he was the lowest scoundrel that ever contaminated it.
I admit that these unfortunates did show bad judgment in remaining in the ministry when they knew they were afflicted with a powerful instinct abhorred by the sexually full-fledged, and they showed the worst kind of judgment in having recourse to boys under puberty. But they were in a tight place, and besides felt that they were doing no one any harm. For the androgyne generally comes at last to the view that |Most Androgynes Ultra-Religious.| what Nature demands can be no sin and, if properly fulfilled, no transgression against any human.
The newspaper devotee runs across a similar item every once in a while, and nearly always the “monster” is a clergyman or a teacher. But the abhorred penchant (fellatio) is, of course, not peculiar to these professions. Simply their high ethical standing, and the common fancy that they should therefore be proof against what is incorrectly regarded as the worst of vices, attract greater attention, and give news value to the occasional disclosures.
But it is probable that among the occupations, those two, together with all having to do with art of any kind, have the largest proportions of androgynes. As a rule, male bisexuals are goody-goody boys who develop into ultra-religious adolescents. They are enthusiastic to better the race morally and spiritually. The robes commonly worn by clergymen are also a powerful drawing card, since androgynes yearn for apparel that conceals that they are bipeds. Thus quite a number who were born intellectual and whose sexual ardor, during adolescence, is comparatively weak, gravitate into the two professions standing highest ethically and religiously. When making his choice, the adolescent is filled with religious fervor and possessed of a strong determination to crucify his “homosexual” tendencies. The androgyne already yielding would never put on “the cloth,” although he would go into pedagogy. But the puritan-minded regards these tendencies as his “besetting sin” and fights them for years in the strenuous manner described in my own Autobiography of an Androgyne. Throughout his teens, and perhaps even his twenties, |Abstinence Induces Melancholia.| he never expects to be overmastered. But later in life many a one of these sexual cripples who have put on “the cloth” disgrace it notwithstanding his prior unparalleled mental struggles against Nature’s behests.