An ultra-androgyne however, although he has the male primary physical attributes, never feels himself to be a real male, but a female incarnated in a male body (often with feminine earmarks), and would no more be able to develop sexual feelings for a female than a normal man for another male.
It is therefore a consummation devoutly to be wished that a book setting forth the facts of androgynism could be distributed among the general public. The author tried to write a compendium for such readers, and The Female-Impersonators is the result.
That he has failed in his attempt is to me not only very apparent, but also quite natural.
To the author nothing that he has written about the practices of androgynes seems what we call immoral or revolting. Because their own congenital sexual tendencies appear to androgynes as the full-fledged man’s appear to the latter.
To the author of The Female-Impersonators it is as natural to fall in love with another male (bearing in mind however that the androgyne is only a “pseudo-male”) and write, what he calls poems, dedicated to his “hero-boys” (who to me appear nothing but low ruffians, blackmailers, and grafters) as it would be for a normal man to fall in love with some good-looking female, and write “poetry” about her, perhaps in some of his later “poems” to bewail the fact that she has proven herself “faithless, truthless, and makes a sale of that which men call love, to him who bids the highest.”
It is therefore but natural that, since the author sees human beings, as it were, distorted through his own mental astigmatism, namely females as belonging to his own sex and males to the opposite, his second book, The Female-Impersonators, contains a great deal which to the average reader would be “shocking”, and thus, instead of accomplishing the result which he intended, would cause disgust, and make the treatment of the androgyne even worse than at present.
After the author had submitted the manuscript of his book to numerous publishers, trying in vain (as I had predicted to him) to induce one of them to bring out the book for general circulation, I agreed to publish it for restricted sale.
Not because I really felt that the book presents a great deal of new material of scientific interest, but because, by describing the life experience of various other androgynes, their viewpoints, their sufferings, it continues the missionary work begun by the author in his Autobiography of an Androgyne and thus helps in keeping up the good work. For, to achieve results, it is not only necessary to awaken interest in a subject, but also to keep that interest alive.
Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi, sed saepe cadendo. “A drop of water wears a hole in a stone, not by force, but by frequently falling.”
That the author is really doing missionary work can not be doubted by me, for I know that he does not derive any financial benefit from the publication of his Autobiography of an Androgyne, nor do I expect he will from the publication of the present sequel.