IV. I Grow into The Fairie Boy.
At sixteen, I entered a college in New York City. I alone was responsible for the scene of my university training. I had frequently visited New York and wished to reside there. But I had then no intention of ever yielding to my detested instincts for female-impersonation. I had not realized that residence in a great city would make temptation far stronger than in a village. My being fated to make my home in New York almost throughout my adulthood has had a tremendous influence on my life, particularly from nineteen to thirty-one.
My father gave me every educational advantage because in the fairly large “prep” that I attended from my tenth to sixteenth years, I attained the highest scholarship in the history of the school. In an address to the students, the principal named me as the youthful scholar to be patterned after by the other boys (!!!).
I know I shall be accused of exaggerated ego for the way I talk about myself in this and the next chapter. But seven articles have been published about myself in medical journals, exclusive of numerous reviews of my Autobiography of an Androgyne. How many people can go into a library, call for magazines, and gaze at pictures of themselves within their covers? How many people have had a three-volume autobiography published? With such a record, I suspect that I am either insane or else one of the half-dozen most |The Author’s Brain.| remarkable sexual curiosities of my generation. On the latter chance, I am moved to leave on record a full account of both my inner and outer rare life experience.
Front View of Author at Thirty-three
(Photo by Dr. R. W. Shufeldt)
As to bragging about my intellect, my experience of half-a-century is that in general, Providence makes compensations in the lives of men so that as they, one by one, pass on to the next world, all have fared equally as concerns Heaven-sent boons and the opposite. As a counterweight to having created me a bitterly persecuted sexual cripple (for His inscrutable but surely wise ends) the Architect of the universe endowed me with a brain of such capacity as found in only one out of twenty-five university graduates. I wrote stories at eight. At thirteen I was confident I would become an author and my name be chiselled on the walls of fame.[[21]]
My college associates commented on my feminesqueness and infantilism. I perceived that I was looked upon as a curiosity.
I am a curiosity in that while throughout life remaining a species of moron,[[22]] certain cerebral lobes have nevertheless progressed to a high development enabling me to graduate from a university almost at the head of my class notwithstanding my general psychic infantilism and my suffering from acute spermatorrhea |The Author a Curiosity.| and (during my freshman and sophomore years) acute melancholia. If my physical health had been as good as that of the three men who outstripped me, I might have led my university class.
I am a curiosity in that down to twenty-five, I was a fair specimen of physical infantilism or lilliputianism. I was said to possess the skull and facial lines of an infant. Down to twenty-five, I never weighed more than 110 pounds on a height of five feet five. Nearly all my brothers and uncles have been six-footers.