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.
III. An Androgyne’s Youth.
It was not until my sixteenth year that I came to a full realization that I am a male in name only. I had always recognized my girl-likeness and wished Nature had created me a female. At the same time I had, during my early teens, sometimes reflected that I would outgrow all my feminine predilections and be a normal man. But at fifteen my bust development made me think that perhaps God at last was answering my fervent prayers, around the age of nine, to be changed into a physical girl. For I was already one psychicly.