Why do cultured androgynes carefully conceal their quasi-feminine sexual predilections? Why did Angelo not publish any of his homosexual sonnets? Why did Raphael not proclaim on the housetops the happenings in his house at night? Androgynes hide their sexual predilections and practices, not because of consciousness of personal degeneracy, but because |Race Suicide.| grossly misunderstood by the sexually full-fledged. By exception, Oscar Wilde was open and above board, and was therefore shut up in prison.
Only bigoted pseudo-scientists have pronounced androgynes degenerates. Only mediæval medicine, not modern medicine. Androgynism is merely an instance of arrested development; or possibly of atavism—an attempt on the part of Nature to return to the original hermaphrodism of man’s early antecedents. The androgyne who follows the dictates of Nature is not a whit more degenerate morally than the full-fledged man who marries. It is only the fallible mores which make the full-fledged think that a person with apparently male pudenda who impersonates a female is infinitely below themselves morally. Were Socrates, Plato, Angelo, Raphael, and Francis Bacon monsters of depravity? Ought the Shakespeare-Author to have been buried alive by his hare-brained fellow citizens before he had a chance to pen a line?
The chief charge against androgynes is that they are guilty of “the awful crime of race suicide.” But it is the fault of Nature alone that the ultra-androgyne is incapable of doing his part in the perpetuation of the race.
The cultured androgyne, knowing his irresistible instincts are harmless to his soul-mate, is unable to discern in them any transgression against ethics or against God.
But a very small proportion of adult androgynes have been guilty of a lamentable transgression because finding themselves in a tight place: that is, recourse to boys under puberty. The prudery of full-fledged men has hitherto prohibited androgynes from |Androgynes’ One Offence.| scientific knowledge of themselves. Until thirty years ago, American and British public opinion would not tolerate the publication of the facts about androgynism even for circulation among the medical profession. Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, the earliest published book in the English language on androgynism, was promptly suppressed by the British government thirty years ago. I myself had to bend the knee for eighteen years to medical publishers before my Autobiography of an Androgyne was fed into the printing-press in 1918.
Thus, because full-fledged men have interdicted to cultured androgynes the means of understanding themselves and knowledge of how they ought to pass their lives, some—particularly those who have achieved places of honor, because androgynes of lower rank do not need to be so crafty in hiding their terrible secret from the heartless world—have ultimately been revealed guilty of recourse to the immature (because they could not screw up their courage to disclose their abnormality to an older and wiser male). But on account of the tyranny of the full-fledged, these erring androgynes merit mercy. Their offences have probably not been at all harmful to the immature. They are merely asserted to be so by men unable to accept any scientific results except those inculcated by mediæval savants. But this one offence of androgynes will be a thing of the past when they are permitted recourse to books which explain the riddle of their lives, and when full-fledged men read such books in order that they may do justice to Nature’s step-children.
As already stated, ultra-androgynes, having a |Androgynes Are Goody-Goodies.| woman’s psyche, are goody-goodies. Indeed goody-goodiness may be regarded as their most marked characteristic. For this reason, in France, they are called “little Jesuses” (petits jesus) notwithstanding that the more extreme are public female-impersonators in resorts of ill repute. Ultra-androgynes are incapable of doing any real harm. If all the human race were as harmless, this world would be a far better place in which to live.
The cultured androgyne is a desirable citizen and a desirable member of any circle. While ultra-androgynism makes its victims physically weak—like a woman—it has no deteriorating effect morally or mentally. The usual charge of gross immorality is merely a relic of mediæval bigotry.
It matters not, however, that androgynes are absolutely innocuous practically and ethically. Do they not offend the æsthetic sense of the majority of mankind? What better cause for grinding them under one’s heel?
And this bitter persecution that has been the lot of some androgynes has rendered them misanthropes. Not their androgynism per se. A mildly androgynous acquaintance—an intellectual giant of the highest moral character except for his irresponsible and innocuous passive pederasty—is, as a result of society’s shutting him up in prison for the five years of his intellectual prime, a chronic and bitter reviler of the Church. Because zealous churchmen were responsible for the wrecking of his life through their misunderstanding of the biblical teaching on homosexuality.