I wish to impress upon the reader that I have not let the sexual appetite possess first place in my life. It had to have its place, but the appetite itself, exclusive of its effects, occupied only a small place. From this autobiography a hasty reader might obtain the impression that I was completely absorbed in the line of life and thought here presented, that it was all I lived for. But it is to be remembered that the object of the book is to delineate the phenomena of androgynism, passive sexual inversion, and psychical infantilism as they manifested themselves in the life of its writer, and to give only such part of his life as was out of the ordinary. My nonsexual life has been along the same lines as that of all other intellectual workers, and is barely touched upon in this autobiography, that is, only where it has a bearing on the phenomena to be delineated. Taking my adulthood as a whole, the sexual side of life has probably occupied my attention only to the same extent as in the case of the average virile man, although much more than in the case of the average woman.
I am uncertain whether the writing out of my experiences has tended to mitigate my sexual instincts. If it has had any influence in this direction, nearly a score of years has been requisite to make perceptible its curative quality.
My own is not an isolated case. Among most races and in all ages of the world, one individual out of about every three hundred physical males—on a conservative estimate—is by birth predominantly female psychically. I merely furnish an extreme case of passive inversion, and
