“I never saw the chevelure [as they shoved their fingers through it] so fine and silklike in any one else who wore trousers. Your hands [as they would hold them] are as soft and hairless as those of a girl. And you have the arms of a woman [when my sleeves were rolled back]. And you blush just like a woman. And you sob like her. I never saw tears run down the cheeks of any other man as he sat in the class-room.”
I have jokingly replied with a smile at my classmate’s mystification: “You do not know but what I am a woman!” But I shrank from any serious disclosure of the secrets of my sex, such a mystery to many of my every-day associates.
If I live to old age, I intend to call the present trilogy to the attention of some of my associates of early years who have indicated great curiosity to know the secrets of my sex life. I have permitted only three friends (of course the closest) who know me under my legal name to read my Autobiography of an Androgyne, and one of the three dropped me from his friendship. |Feminine Figure Recognized.| Men are so biased on the subject of sex that I can not let my friends read the secrets of my life until I reach an independent old age when they can not make me suffer much on account of my androgynism.
In college, I was compelled to exercise in the “gym.” I hid my form. It was a terrible ordeal to have to strip before the physical director, who remarked: “Your figure is feminine.” Apparently he did not suspect the sexuality that was bound up with that figure. If military drill had been required—as in 1917—I would have quit the university.[[24]]
Since nineteen my yearning for skirts has been in part met by habitually wearing about my home an ornamental dressing-gown. Thus clad, I have often gazed in a mirror, imagining myself a complete female. I have taken pleasure in hearing the gown rustle, like a silk dress; in feeling it strike against my legs; and in holding up the front in ascending the stairs.
The Fairie Boy was my nickname from nineteen to thirty-one outside my every-day circle. And outside I was far more widely known. Inside I had the reputation of being an insignificant, puritan, unpractical book-worm and Mollie Coddle who knew nothing of life and human nature. Outside I achieved wide notoriety as an amateur actor—or, properly speaking, actress.
Man, Woman, and Infant in One Body.
That the distinction, among the sons of Adam, of being The Fairie Boy came to me, is nothing for which I can take credit to myself. It was merely because Providence had made me, as an adult, physically as well as psychicly, one-third man, one-third woman, and one-third infant. Providence endowed me with a “small-boy” aspect, the subject of comment in my every-day circle down to my early forties; freshness of complexion down to thirty; innocent expression of features and marvellous absence of animality (in appearance only); cry-baby mentality; eternal childlikeness even in my professional life; and slender, lithe, and lilliputian figure down to twenty-five.
The Fairie Boy! To be frank—I am proud of the pretty nickname. This Providential distinction is part of my compensation for my almost unparalleled sufferings from persecution at present inseparable from the lot of an ultra-androgyne.
