Special Issue on David O. Cauldwell (1897-1959): Classic Reprints Series
(Reprints Series edited by Richard Ekins and Dave King)

SEX TRANSMUTATION – CAN ONE’S SEX BE CHANGED?

THERE’S BUT A THIN GENETIC LINE BETWEEN THE SEXES, BUT THE WOULD-BE TRANSMUTEE BATTLES FORCES MORE STUBBORN THAN THE GENES

(Originally published by Haldeman-Julius Publications, Girard, Kansas, 1951. Copyright, 1951, by E. Haldeman-Julius.)

By D.O. Cauldwell, M.D., Sc.D.

Citation: Cauldwell D.O. (2001) Sex Transmutation – Can One's Sex Be Changed? There's But a Thin Genetic Line Between the Sexes, But the Would-be Sex Transmutee Battles Forces More Stubborn Than the Genes. IJT 5,2, http://www.symposion.com/ijt/cauldwell/cauldwell_05.htm

INTRODUCTION

Whether you are a male or a female, you owe it to the accident that the chromosomes determining your sex got the upper hand at the most propitious moment. Just as psychiatrists hold that the line between mental balance and mental unbalance is extremely thin, the geneticists hold that genetically the line between the sexes is exceedingly thin.

Males and females aren’t as different as propagandists, who often speak and write without thinking, seem to assume. Genitally we differ less than is generally believed.

Males have what have been called the vestiges of the important female reproductive organs and females experience the sexual climax in an organ which is so analogous to the principal male genital, the penis, that it is called the penis muliebris, the penis of the woman.

Males and females think differently as a result of social evolution and individualism. No two individuals think just alike. There isn’t any distinct male way of thinking and there isn’t any distinct female way of thinking. We find, when we examine impartially, that there are social patterns of feminine thought just as there are social patterns of masculine thought. Basic patterns probably have not changed since the genus homo became a distinct species in the primitive jungle.

I’ve read several times that some geneticists, as well as some rather outstanding taxonomists, believe that there are separate and distinct species within the human family. If this is true, none can say how many species exist. It is tenable, at least, to theorize that there are thousands of species within the human family. (To say millions may be as reasonable.) The theory is supported by vastly greater evidence than the claim that there are hundreds of races of man. Those anthropologists who hold that there are but three races have a great deal of prima facie evidence in their favor. The three races are: The Caucasoid, the Negroid and the Mongoloid.

Until a more systematic study has been made, we are unable to state definitely that human hybrids are either common or rare. What evidence we have indicates rareness rather than commonness. The fact may possibly account for the childlessness of an untold number of couples who have not the vaguest idea that they are of different genetic species.

Whenever we deal with the genes we deal with intangibles and we should leave genetic explanations, beyond those of rather common knowledge, to the geneticists to explain. Few of them, although they themselves know perfectly well facts about the genes which the non-geneticist can hardly understand are capable of explaining genetic facts.

If a male happens to inherit more of certain genes from his mother and his female ancestors provided they are what we call feminine-appearing, he will look somewhat feminine regardless of the capacity of his gonads or the dimensions of his other genital organs. The same is true with regard to females. Thus it comes about that we have men who are regarded as feminine-appearing, and females who are regarded as masculine-looking. The appearance depends on genetic heritage, while sex depends on the chromosomes for its distinction. It is remarkable that, when dressed alike, the sex of children is extremely difficult to distinguish. It is only at puberty when the genitals develop and other secondary sex characteristics begin to appear that we can distinguish, generally, the male and female features. The reason is that genes, which have been more or less dormant, stimulated by the sex hormones (augmented by other hormones), become active. Even then the male or the female features may fail to be manifest as a predominant part of the appearance.

Males who are careful about shaving, and females who devise means of overcoming bust prominence, frequently find, when they learn voice modulation and mannerism control, that they can pass as readily for one sex as they can pass as members of the other sex. Males have lived long and useful lives under the guise of females and females have lived long and as usefully as males in the world of man. The famous Chevalier d’ Eon lived such a dual role that the public learned his true sexual identity only when he had been examined after his death by a reputable surgeon. A women physician practiced medicine nearly 40 years in the state of Arkansas and was believed by all who knew her to be the man she pretended to be – until the time of her death, when colleagues discovered the truth.

Here and there so-called cases of surgical sex-transmutation have been reported. In some of these cases a surgical error has been committed and in others the errors have been reportorial. The positive facts concerning sex transmutation (transmutation in this sense meaning crossing over) will be given in the course of study covered by this booklet. We need to study a great deal more than the concise facts in order to understand the many faceted question involving sex transmutation.

We need to understand sex in its genital meaning. We also need to understand sex in its physical and psychological manifestation as a passion. In order to appreciate those tangibles and intangibles, we need to look into social attitudes. We shall consider the importance, also, of individual attitudes. In all of this we will find it helpful to understand and evaluate individual attitudes within the whole of our social structure.

It is true, whether or not well known, that individuals confined in institutions for the mentally unsound have contributed original ideas, which have led to progress and the greater comfort of the human family. It is equally true, although frequently unobserved, that ideas which have done the human family vast harm have originated in the minds of the mentally unfit who are as free as the birds of the air.

We can begin to see that a study of the ideas prompting a desire for sex transmutation may lead us into many avenues of thought and critical examination. If we are to understand we must examine quite a number of thought patterns. If our path follows a course through rugged domains I trust that I shall be able to leave the wake in which the reader may follow as calm and unruffled as a quiet sea after a storm. For, if we are to understand various emotional conflicts, we must examine the material conducive to these conflicts.

HE WANTED TO BE A WOMAN

John wanted to be a woman until –

John was reared by women. As a child he was treated as a girl. He found play with boys so rough that he hid in the basement of the palatial home in which he was born and was emaciated for want of food when found. After that, John was withdrawn from the public schools and taught by a governess.

When John was 12 he observed that his genitals began growing rapidly. He experienced frequent erections and, in the process of pressing his penis with his hand to assuage its turgidity, discovered self-induced sex gratification. He soon learned to induce erection and found a previously undreamed-of pleasure in relieving tension caused by the turgidity of the organ.

John’s appreciation of the genital (or sexual) passions took on new meaning when, due to his educational advancement, his governess left and a capable young woman came to tutor him. This young woman recognized John for what he was – a male grown into early manhood. Her life was a drab one and, having been initiated into the delights of the Garden of Eros, she initiated John in the course of his instruction.

Two years after John learned the appeasement of the passions both autosexually and heterosexually, he was ready for the great step his matriarchal family long had planned. But John’s captives failed to tell John what they planned and thereon hangs the story of John of later years.

The family plan was to have John’s genital organs removed and an artificial vagina constructed in their stead. A surgeon who had been deprived of the legal right to practice his profession agreed, for a price, to do the surgery. John was fed a nonfatal dose of poison which causes serious abdominal cramps attended by unusually sharp pains. The surgeon was called in. He gave the verdict that an emergency operation must be performed there in the home at once.

While he was being anesthetized John heard a side remark, which made him suspicious. In agonizing pain and drunk from the drug he had been given, he reached the street without being apprehended. The family, to save itself, had John confined in a private institution. By this time he was emotionally unbalanced. He was afraid to sleep. Within a week he contrived to escape from the place. His family never heard from him again.

Is this fact or fiction? It would be a millennium indeed were all such stories fiction. It might lead to genuine progress for the human race were all such stories which are fact exposed. I have no reason to doubt a single word of John’s story. I personally helped John to have a legal identity. He told me that had the surgery been proposed before he learned the pleasure to be experienced through the appeasement of the passions he would readily have agreed, for he wanted to be a woman until he learned the joy of being just what he was-a male.

She Wanted to be a Man

Jean wanted to be a man.

Jean was born into a poor family. Everything enjoyed by the family was earned by the men. The older women of the family showed great partiality to the male members. Food for the males capable of earning income was specially prepared. The best chairs in the house were reserved for them. The males who were without feminine partners had the best beds.

Jean and four sisters managed to get along. They wore ragged, or at best, shoddy clothes. They slept on hard beds. They yielded the best chairs to the males. They early learned to launder and press male garments and to act as slaves for the males of the family. Jean’s sisters were older and married young. But Jean wanted to be a man. She didn’t grow up to hate her father, her brothers and her uncles who lived with them. She grew up to admire them and to want to be like them.

One of the males took the fancy of wanting Jean to become a nurse. The women of the family did not object and so, in due time, Jean became a nurse and wore a stiffly starched uniform and hated it and felt the urge to kill every time she had to say "Yes, Doctor," and "No, Doctor." Then Jean found a doctor she admired as much as she admired the male members of her family. This doctor did some strange and fascinating experimenting with insects and animals. He’d been something of a globe-trotter, was immensely wealthy, and was a power in the medical world. Too, he was constantly needing someone to help with his numerous experiments.

Jean’s training as a slave for men made her a natural for the post of assistant and accomplice and the famous doctor readily recognized her traits and invited her to stand in during some of the experiments.

Jean saw the delicate operation of transferring sections of the brain of the beetle from male to female and vice versa. She observed that after the delicate operation male beetles acted like female and female beetles acted like males.

She saw the transplantation of male gonads into female mice and the transference of the female gonads to male mice. Males lost their maleness and assumed some of the characteristics of females, while females lost their femaleness and acted, to an extent, like males.

Jean toyed with an idea but she was not willing for even this renowned surgeon to tamper with her brain. Eventually she approached the great doctor with her idea. She wanted him to help her become a man.

This was an experiment the doctor wanted to try but he was fearful lest the consequences turn out direfully for him. Day after day Jean and the doctor held speculative discussions and Jean announced that she was ready even though the experiment should cost her life. The doctor was more level-headed. He told Jean that he wanted to know more about certain phases of such an operation before attempting it.

About this time a great opportunity came to the doctor. He was consulted by a man whose penis had been amputated as the result of an injury. He hoped the great doctor would be able to use some of his own body structures and create a semblance, at least, of the male genital for him.

Such a thing had been done and the surgeon set about the work like the expert he was. He released a length of the lower rib by severing its continuity, and, keeping it well covered with its original skin and properly supplied by uninterrupted blood vessels, he implanted it its full length from the furthermost end, downward on the patient’s abdomen. In successive stages of weeks, the rib piece was literally walked downward over the pelvis to the thigh opposite the scrotum. Scrotal skin then was joined to the skin covering of what was to be the substitute phallus and the new organ was implanted and fixed against the stump of the original phallus. A channel had been established in the artificial organ and this was readily united with the natural urethra.

Jean assisted with every stage of the operation and beamed with delight when the patient stood before her and the surgeon, to all appearances as whole a male as he had been born. Later she heard the doctor explaining to the patient that he might be capable of performing the sexual act and sensing release from sexual tension by manipulating the stump of the original organ. Jean was to leave the hospital the following day and go to the doctor’s secret laboratory in the costal jungles where she would live while the surgeon removed her breast, built a substitute phallus, and eventually removed the ovaries and closed the vagina. But that plague of doctor’s, coronary thrombosis, dealt a deathblow to the famous surgeon during the night and thereafter Jean’s dream began slowly to fade.

At the request of a young consulting psychologist Jean went to nurse in an institution for the mentally ill. There, within a short while, she learned more than she had believed possible about the emotional conflicts of environment. She observed how environment had played havoc with the sexuality of her patients and from nymphomaniacs she heard stories of burning passion and the inadequacy of man to appease. It came to Jean that if man could not appease them why be a man? Why want to be a man?

Family illness sent Jean home temporarily. She returned to her work more confused than ever. Soon she, herself, became an inmate. Four years later, with some help from psychiatrists and with help and encouragement from the consulting psychologist who had influenced her to nurse at the place, Jean was rehabilitated as a member of free society. Several months later she married. Her first pregnancy resulted in twins. She told me that she could not have been made happier. "I intend to see," she told me, "that my babies grow up learning, in every way not illegal or antisocial, the fullest meaning they can know about the sex to which each belongs." Jean’s twins were a boy and a girl.

In writing about this case I am not concerned with the possible success or failure of Jean’s original plan. I am concerned with the needless suffering she felt and the great unhappiness she knew. And I am concerned over the fact that we have lawmakers who enact laws making almost everything antisocial a crime except one of the greatest crimes of all – the criminal creation of environments which make lives more insufferable than the pictures of hell painted by the ignorant and unfeeling pious.

One Male Homosexual’s Plight

Several months ago I had a letter from a male homosexual who wrote to tell me that he appreciated the work that I was doing in trying not only to help disturbed homosexuals to understand themselves, but in trying to give society a more tolerant understanding of them as well. We exchanged three or four letters in which my correspondent gave me some exceptionally valuable information with relation to well-adjusted homosexuals.

Several weeks ago my former correspondent stopped briefly to see me. With him was a companion, to all appearance an attractive young female, but whom I suspected of being a male transvestist. I wasn’t kept long in suspense. My correspondent of months ago never called himself by any name other than his genuine masculine name. He never thought of himself as anything but what he was – a male homosexual.

"This," he told me, "is Clara. I want you to know about Clara. She was a man. And as a man she was as homosexual as they come. Then her parents learned about her homosexuality. They made her so unhappy and called her so many names she didn’t like, such as a fairy, a queer, etc., that she went on a rampage, drinking and fighting. She chose as her prey athletes, policeman, firemen, life guards and the like. Her parents were impressed and not only paid her fines but furnished her with plenty of money with which to continue drinking and getting into jail for fighting. They decided they had been wrong and that they had not raised a weakling. But when they were fully convinced and the family reputation for masculinity of its males had been saved they shut Clara off without a penny.

"Clara had always wanted to be a girl. So – Clara now, without a means of venting her fury, became morose and despondent. She decided she’d be a girl in spite.

"An aunt of Clara’s who had not known the primrose path and who had married some three or four wads of heavy sugar, gave Clara a present and Clara tried to get an operation to change her sex. Despondent over failure after failure she amputated her penis and almost bled to death because she fainted from the sight and loss of blood.

"The doctors saved her. They removed her testicles for fear of infection because Clara proved to be a careless surgeon. Clara’s aunt stood with her and eventually a surgeon created for her an artificial vagina by using a loop of small intestine.

"I’ll let Clara tell you the rest of the story."

Clara said there wasn’t much to tell. She felt as much a male as ever and as much a homosexual. She’s never had enough beard to worry about and she made a passable woman. She was promiscuous with males who believed her to be every inch a woman. But she derived no satisfaction of a sexual nature when she copulated with males who were unable to tell the difference between a loop of small intestine and a natural vagina. The only time she ever felt relief from sexual tension (and she assured me that she sensed it more than ever) was when she was dextrous enough to guide a phallus in the direction to which she had previously been accustomed. In this way, aside from the mental or emotional satisfaction she experienced, she had strong sensations of orgasm as a result of stimulation of the surgically undisturbed prostate gland.

Clara said: "I’m breaking in appearance because of all I’ve gone through physically and emotionally. My skin is wrinkling and my metabolism is not good.

"Outwardly my sex has been changed. But inwardly I am just as much a male as ever and my preference for men is the preference of the homosexual. I’m far too wise to try to tease myself into believing that I am a female or that, because of my artificial feminine attributes, I am heterosexual."

I think that both of them sensed that there was an unanswered question in my mind. Clara volunteered: "The two of us have been friends a long time. But our interest in one another was never sexual. We had it in common that we wanted to go out after men. That didn’t mean having any sort of a sexual alliance between ourselves. We’re traveling together now because we are a business team and being apparently male and female contributes to the success of our team."

Clara had the apparent appurtenances. Gynecomastia of undetermined origin (it usually is of undetermined origin) gave her the appearance of having at least satisfactory mammary tissue. It was her plight to regret the destruction of that which could not be restored.

Sex Destructionists

The urge leading to a desire to change one’s sex may sometimes evolve from a deeper, often sinister, motive which has its roots in such severe sex hatred that those feeling it would like to see sex destroyed. Victims of the severely sex-hating psychosis do not hesitate to mutilate their own genitals when under sufficient psychotic pressure. Moments before doing a serious mutation one of these people may appear as what the average individual would term perfectly normal.

Recently a case happened not far from our home in which a man actually left a pawn with a woman from whom he borrowed a butcher knife with which to castrate himself. Furthermore, hardly more than seconds after borrowing the knife, he returned the bloody knife and retrieved his pawn.

Individuals who turn destruction on themselves impose on society by becoming burdens to it. But there are individuals who would destroy sex completely were it within their power. Now and then these people break into print and their warped minds show clearly that except for fear and legal restraint they would go on sex-destroying rampages.

These maniacs cloak their psychological identities from the general public, but they often stir the seeds of discontent and this leads to injury.

I have just read an article in a current magazine in which it was predicted that a time will come when there will be neither sex nor love. Humans will be bred in the laboratory and they will be so perfect that a super-race will exist. It will not even be necessary for there to be any distinction between the sexes. But, as a rank amateur would suggest, the author forgot that since sexlessness would be laboratory controlled there would not be any genital organs. In his forgetting the averred that the useless genitals would simply shrink and go away. I refrain from mentioning the magazine or the name of the author because I have respect for the magazine and I know nothing personally about the author. My impression, while reading the article, was that the author was something of a prankster toying with an idea in the field of fantasy. His ideas could have been based on his observations of actually sex-sick and hence sick-minded people. The ideas presented and the prediction made indicate the directions in which the mind of sex destructionists work.

Let any healthy-minded individual ask himself whether life would be worth living in the absence of the sex instinct. Or what would it profit the human family to become otherwise superior were it deprived of sex and love?

Our prophet thinks that in less than 1,000 years medical scientist will have ushered in his sexless age. Medical scientists will hardly achieve such power even if they gain suitable knowledge. The people will continue to hold the power in their hands. Furthermore, I hardly think there ever were, or ever will be, as many damned fools among medical scientists as our seer predicted.

Some of the sex destructionists are rather mild-mannered. Probably all of us know, or have known, both men and women who devoted all of their spare energies to preventing people sexually inclined from having and opportunity to indulge their sexual natures. At parties where a little private necking may be done by just about anyone not a sex hater, these destructionists have the knack of showing up on the scene just when a couple may be about to embrace. They are perpetual chaperons. At house parties, or when friends and relatives visit, these nuisances manage to arrange to prevent husbands and wives from sleeping together. In one case a young couple told me that a married aunt, whose husband was impotent and had never consummated marriage, maneuvred so skilfully that she prevented them from consummating their marriage for more than a month. The husband was a soldier at the time and his wife’s aunt as the young husband said, "fluorescing" interest, goodness and kindness, managed perfectly to see that the young lovers didn’t have a chance during his almost impossible hours away from duty.

One of my prolific correspondents who has furnished me with a vast amount of original research material as well as specific articles from magazines, newspapers, whole chapters torn from valuable books, etc., is a male homosexual who doesn’t seem to have the least idea of his destructionism. He would, however, had he the power, destroy all females at birth except just enough calculated to bring males for male homosexuals into life. And he’d quite begrudgingly permit males who developed characteristics undesirable to him, to copulate with these females in order to maintain a status quo of the male population. He has toyed with the idea of preventing males from copulating with females and of artificially inseminating selected females with semen from the most desirable homosexual males.

One might gain the impression that the homosexual male to whom I refer is severely frustrated. I am well aware that he is not frustrated for lack of sexual partners, although I’ve an idea that the majority of his partners indulge him rather reluctantly. The man is wealthy and doesn’t mind paying in a modest way for cooperation and pretended friendship. To protect himself from what he would regard as unreasonable demands, he plays poor and lets his consorts believe that the sums he bestows on them come from his meager wages. His chosen work is easy, although (to add to his psychological scheme) regarded as somewhat menial.

We find still another sex destructionist in the author who wrote that already women are bearing babies without the collaboration of the male. He referred to artificial insemination. What the author overlooked was that a male who furnishes semen for artificially inseminating any women collaborates.

The sex destructionist hates to think of sexual pleasure. Yet there are sex destructionists who are capable of realizing a high degree of sexual pleasure. The whole story of these severely warped and eroded individuals cannot be told in a few words. It is hardly worth telling in many words. It is to be doubted whether an average person of ordinary human characteristics would be happy to tell the story in a completely unbiased manner, merely supposing for the sake of convenience that this is possible, and without a few well-chosen epithets. Personally I have no desire to stigmatize them further than they have stigmatized themselves or have been thus castigated because they lacked the ambition to rise above a damning environment. Rarely can they be cured or helped. They desire neither cure nor help and would be intentionally unhappy, morose and despondent if deprived of their sadistic inclinations.

Much more could be said most appropriately about sex destructionists. It has been my desire to set the reader to thinking of the cases of sex destructionism of which he is well aware and of the consequences of the influence of these individuals on other people. This may stimulate any alert reader (not of the category) into doing whatever he or she may, if only by dropping a gentle word of enlightenment here and there, to improve the environment of those who may otherwise become entangled in the destructionist’s net.

Before leaving the subject we should call to mind those sex destructionists who, even while in full possession of their own sex powers and capable of experiencing sexual pleasure, lose no opportunity to paint a black picture of the indulgence of the natural sexual passions. Medical opinion and wide publicity to the contrary notwithstanding, the destructionists still revel in scattering the tales of the alleged dire consequences of masturbation.

Those who continue to repeat the tales of ignorance inherited by the medical profession from the earlier practitioners, the priestcraft, are always ready to tell the uniformed that venereal disease lurks in every act of sexual indulgence and that they have known many men and women whose genitals were eaten by venereal disease.

Venereal diseases do not eat away the genital organs, although there may be considerable erosion in untreated chancre. Venereal diseases are not difficult to control and treat today. Simply touching a laceration or an abrasion with a contaminated finger may lead to septicemia and death from tetanus in matter of hours. Venereal disease does not do this. A fractional overdose of various drugs, helpful within their dosage limits, may mean death in a matter of minutes. The pet parrot hanging in his cage near the small child’s bed and squawking to the child’s pleasure and entertainment, may carry the virus (causing sleeping sickness) that snuffs out the child’s life. Venereal disease does not do these things nor does venereal disease today need do any damage of consequence.

I should not forget that there are sex destructionists of a kind w ho repeat the lie that performing the sex act while standing may cripple a person for life. And I feel impelled to mention the story often told by mere ignoramuses, noticed by E. Haldeman-Julius in a recent issue of his American Freeman, to the effect that in the oral act performed on the penis of the male the "back-bone may be sucked dry."

Some few of the superstitions simply are repeated for the amusement of those who repeat them. But in vicious repetition we find the seeds of the sex destructionist.

Those who praise the alleged virtues of so-called immaculate conception (conception resulting from artificial insemination and excluding the sex act between the donors of the elements leading to a new life) are, even though unconsciously so, sex destructionist.

Let those who must, dream of a sexless and loveless world of supermen. The healthy-minded must learn to remain uncontaminated by these poisoners and would-be poisoners of humans and human environment.

Transmutation or Destructionsm

We now come to an extremely serious and important discussion. We well may pause to ask whether persons who honestly believe that they desire sex transmutation for themselves do not, unconsciously desire to destroy their sexuality.

Several well-known prolific psychiatric writers have expressed the unshakable opinion that an individual who longs for sex transmutation has a psychopathic desire for the destruction of his (or her) own sex. Hardly anyone who has written me concerning a desire for sex transmutation has given evidence of other than a morbid state of mind.

Thumbing through a sheaf of letters, I am impressed with how often an extremely morbid state of mind is shown. But I am impressed, at the same time, with the attempted shrewdness of some of the writers of such letters.

The following brief excerpts speak for themselves.

From H. A. of California:

"I think I have the symptoms of cancer of the prostrate gland and I have read that castration sometimes relieves symptoms. Now were I castrated my penis would not be worth anything to me except for use as a urethral canal and that would not have to be any longer than the same canal in a female. For the same reason, if I am castrated, I may as well get my penis amputated at the same time. Then to keep me from appearing awkward, a surgeon if kindhearted enough would create for me an artificial vagina. Female hormones should help me to grow breasts and to improve my mannerisms and appearance as a woman which I strongly resemble now, anyway.

"Could you not write and explain to a local doctor that I should be castrated on account of symptoms of prostrate cancer? I could tell him too. Then, you might suggest that the worthless penis would only be in my way and that would take care of getting rid of that organ which is of no benefit to me now. Later, when I was well you could help me out with a plastic surgeon who could create a vagina for me. You could impress him that I am interested only for the sake of appearance. I don’t ever want any sex."

This man conveniently overlooked the fact that the penis is useful sexually after castration. He apparently was ignorant of the fact that doctors like to do their own diagnoses unless, for convenience and (in various instances) for greater accuracy, they refer their patients to diagnostic specialists.

Only a morbid mortido and sex hatred would have prompted anyone to have written as H.A. of California wrote. Still, in H.A. there were strong seeds of desire. He was as guileless in thinking that he could deceive doctors as he probably was in his efforts to deceive himself. I believe his thoughts were largely fantasy and that had he been threatened with emasculation, even if promised safety and an anesthetic, he’d have fought against it.

From H.D. of Oklahoma:

"I’ve always hated being a female. I may not be able to have a surgically created penis but I want my large ugly breasts removed. I think I have a lot of the male sex hormone naturally in my system and with these horrid breasts out of the way I could strap an artificial set of male genitals including penis and testicles onto me and pass for a male. All I want to do is to live as a male and not be hampered by these big breasts. I don’t care anything about a sex life although I’ve had what might be called homosexual experiences. Because I did not have a male organ, or a substitute, I never did anything below the breasts.

"I hate my own breasts but enjoy caressing the breasts of other females. This isn’t much sex, of course. It sometimes stirs these girls up but I never let them get away from me before they cool down because I don’t want any of them going out looking for some damned man.

"Tell me where I can find a surgeon who will remove my breasts and then give me the name of a house manufacturing artificial male genitals. I’ve heard of them and have been told that they make products you can’t tell from the real and that these artificial things fool experienced women. I’ve all the money I need to take care of this."

After I had prompted H.D., she wrote in another letter:

"It may be vicious but it thrills me to stir women up and then leave them to cool off without further help. I suppose you’d say I get sexually excited when I see that they are excited and I like to see the different reactions to be observed in different girls. It shouldn’t hurt them to have to cool down without any actual commitment any more than it does me and I get a positive bang out of it."

I couldn’t help H.D. to change her viewpoint and silently predicted that she’d soon be either in an institution (not that she didn’t have a bright mind, because she did) or in jail. She landed in jail. After she was released she informed me that she could not understand why a sexologist who was a humanitarian wouldn’t go to any extreme to help people to realize their exact personal desires in a sexological way.

From K.K. of Kansas:

"It’s utterly useless to try to force me to go through life as a female and if I had male genitals I wouldn’t touch sex. It’s the conventional thing in law and society for the male to be able to display his genital organs as proof of his masculinity. It seems feasible to me that if you’d put me in touch with a male who wants to be a female, he and I might undergo surgical change of genital organs.

"If you think I do not know considerable about these surgical possibilities, then tell me what you think about what I did. I took two male dogs and strapped them so that they could not move in a way to damage the work I meant to experiment with. I saw that they had food and water and that they could move their limbs and various parts of the body to keep up circulation. Then I used local anesthetic injections I got from a veterinary and deadened their penes. I cut their organs part way off and sewed them together where I cut but I could transfer only one organ. It grew onto the other dog, but infection developed and one day when I went to see about them both dogs were dead.

"I’ve read that organs can now be preserved by just the right refrigeration and I don’t see why through some method, I can’t make a mutual exchange of feminine organs I do not want for masculine organs a male does not want.

"If you think all this sounds fantastic I have a question. Isn’t sex?"

This correspondent expressed mild ideas by comparison to those expressed by some correspondents. People who have written to me (telling me that they could not mention such matters to anyone in person) have advocated laws which would require individuals condemned to execution to give up their genitals for the sake of what my correspondents called sex transmutation.

M.O., from Ohio, wrote:

"I want to have a sex transmutation but I would never be satisfied with a mere artificial vagina like I’ve read about being made from a piece of the little gut. Would that be big enough

anyway? I think anything is right and not criminal or sinful if done within legal limits and for the sake of experimentation. To this end I propose that I’ll be the guinea pig getting a vagina from a woman who is being sent over the threshold into eternity for a crime, if doctors will be daring enough to make the transfer."

Thousands who speak glibly of sex transmutation do not understand the meaning of transmutation.

I could continue adding excerpts from long letters but these would show little variation from a principal pattern. This pattern involves destruction and entirely false ideas about what constitutes crossing over from one sex to another.

An indignant correspondent wrote:

"You say it would be criminal to destroy my healthy genital organs. Why would it be criminal? They’re mine aren’t they? How does the law think it has any say about what’s done with any part of me if I desire it?"

The law doesn’t usually say a great deal about what an individual does to himself if he avoids becoming a burden to society and if he demonstrates sufficient soundness of mind to act as a safeguard to society. The law does have, and rightly, much to say about what anyone does to someone else.

Super-Race Advocates

The following letter almost surprised me and I’m practically immune to surprise.

"Dear Dr Cauldwell: I think you could help me by offering some suggestions as to a way to organize the kind of society I’ve wanted to organize since my first marriage went on the rocks and I learned that unbridled sex creates an inferior race.

"My object is to establish a model for the world to follow and I have a number of backers who would form the nucleus for such an organization.

"In my model society to create a model for the world to follow I would incorporate under the laws and my charter would guarantee me immunity from the penalties prescribed because of the nature of my work. My work would be based on religion and the Bible and the fact that the Bible grants the chosen of God a great many privileges we would now call experimentation.

"In my colony we would give the world’s greatest surgeons unlimited experimentation material. Whenever a child reached a certain age it would start a series of physical and intelligence tests. When a zenith had been reached the gonads of the healthiest males would be transferred to the males with the highest intelligence rating. The same thing would be done in the case of females, and the resulting children would become superior parents. If this process were kept up it would soon be unnecessary to continue the transplantation operations because we would have a stock from which to procreate. And as an act of kindness, those who received the inferior gonads or the inferiors receiving other gonads, both sexes included, would be sterilized and allowed every sexual privilege their hearts would desire. They would not be required to work and donations from outside would be appropriated to see that they had luxury and comfort as long as they lived."

The transplantation mentioned cannot be done. The law does not grant the special immunities mentioned under any charter – it cannot. As I said, I was almost surprised. Plainly this woman was and is crazy.

Transmutation In the News

Several months ago a case of sex transmutation was reported in a large city on the east coast of the United States. This was the case of a person reared as a girl and believing that this was the proper sex until secondary male sex characteristics became so noticeable as to cause embarrassment. Doctors became interested and, according to the naive press reports asked the person (called Joan if I remember correctly) whether she wanted to be a boy. Joan decided in favor of maleness and became John.

A different case on the west coast at about the same time was that of a person reared as a boy who turned out to be more like a girl at that certain age when secondary sex characteristics became noticeable. I do not recall the name or names published in this case.

It has been my policy to forget names (so seldom correct) published in reports of some of these cases. In the east coast case a doctor was reported to have performed a sex transmutation operation on Joan, thus turning her into him called John. Later, according to reports, John married a girl who knew about his case. Medical reports indicated that John could become a father.

The name and address of the doctor who performed the operation on Joan-John appeared in news reports and magazine articles all over the country. Then, remarkably, I began receiving letters from individuals who desired a change of sex, asking me the name of the doctor who operated on John and whether I thought it would be possible for him to be persuaded to transmute the sex of my correspondents. When I say remarkably, I mean just that. The reason is that my correspondents had access to the same reading material I had and I cannot believe there was a blind spot in their minds where the doctor’s name and address were printed.

This means only one thing to me. Those who wrote to ask me for the doctor’s name and address, and who wondered whether he could be persuaded to operate in their favor and how much it would cost, etc., would not have accepted sex transmutation as a free gift could it have been handed to them. On the contrary, they did not want to be one whit different than what they were, but they had fantasied and thus mulled the idea over in their minds and it gave them an erratic thrill to discuss it or to know someone to whom they could tell their stories and be heard with sympathetic understanding.

The truth is that Joan was never a female and there was no sex transmutation operation. Joan (who became John by a name change and legal correction) was a male with a deformity of the genital organs. Just what the deformity was I am unprepared to say but it was more than likely what is known as hypospadias. The urinary opening was large (several times larger than the natural size of the urethral outlet) and located on the under side of the penis. Evidently the penis was extremely short. In some of these cases the glans penis is barely visible and the urinary sinus (opening) with the scrotal folds at each side, giving the appearance of the greater and lesser lips, looks so nearly like the vagina of a normal female as to deceive a doctor whose examination is of a casual nature. It was determined that John’s gonads were testicles. That settled his sexual identity. He was a male. The operation performed on John did not transmute his sex but corrected his deformity and gave him an unquestionable status as a member of his proper sex – that of the male.

The west coast case represented a case of an enlarged clitoris and a severe vaginal atresia (closure.) The enlarged clitoris had been mistaken for a penis of the male type. Surgery merely corrected a deformity and did not change (transmute) the sex.

Numerous similar cases have reached the headlines and the columns of various popular magazines. I do not recall ever having read of any of these cases in which the medical facts were given. Such stories invariably lead individuals of a certain eccentric turn of mind to speculating. Some such persons are lead into such wishful thinking as to become severely morose and now and then an individual victimized by environment to hate his or her sex goes completely beserk, with results that are extremely unwholesome.

Mutate is commonly defined as "to alter, modify, change, deviate from type." To transmute means to change from one form, nature, substance, or species into another. Geneticists speak of the mutation of genes and of their crossing over into a different type. It is usually considered that in crossing over a gene takes some of its inherent characteristics with it, but it isn’t true that this always happens.

Changes occur in entire sets of chromosomes, in whole chromosomes and in amounts or portions of chromosomes, according to Dr. William C Boyd, a well-known and highly recognized geneticist. According to the same authority, there also are changes in relations of parts of chromosomes and in the composition of individual genes. These data appear in Dr Boyd’s Genetics and the Races of Man.

Sex is determined by the chromosomes, at the time of conception. Anything resembling a mutation thereafter is a deformity, or, as I have explained rather fully in several of my Haldeman-Julius booklets, a developmental defect.

It is appropriate to speak briefly concerning deformities. The human race has so long lived in darkness and superstition that the minds of those who have been able to see light, facts and truth, have fought against terrific odds.

An example of the hold superstition has on intelligent people is that woman with whom I am well acquainted. The woman’s uterus had been removed. The oviducts had been closed. The stump of the uterus was thoroughly closed against the cervix, which was left intact. This woman, who was considerably above the average in intelligence, consulted a woman clairvoyant, who predicted that within two years this woman would give birth to a male child. The woman should have laughed. Instead she came to me in a seriously disturbed state of mind. I explained to her that it was impossible for her to become pregnant. She insisted that the clairvoyant had been able to see something that we doctors knew nothing about.

Several local physicians assured the woman just as I did but she could not be consoled. She told each of us in turn that she would not object to having another baby. Indeed she would be happy to do so. She feared that pregnancy could only result in serious complications and that her child would be certain to be a freak.

This woman had one child, a daughter, mature and married and living in a distant city. The daughter eventually became disturbed by her mother’s letters and visited her mother and persuaded her to return to the large city with her, where she might be examined by a number of highly skilled specialists.

The specialists failed to be convincing and the daughter returned with her mother, almost certain that the end of the road for the woman would be confinement in an institution, suicide or something equally tragic. In a conversation with one of the local doctors, the younger woman remarked that the clairvoyant had later admonished her mother to keep away from any man if she didn’t want to become pregnant. At that time she was warned of dire results – a freak child and possibly death. The doctor idly remarked that perhaps the clairvoyant had been posted. A little detective work on the part of the daughter revealed that the woman’s own husband was the culprit in collaboration with the clairvoyant, with whom he was having an affair. He had been repulsed by his wife’s operation (simply an old fogy idea) and after beginning clandestine negotiations of a sexual nature with him the clairvoyant decided that she wanted all other women to leave him alone. It was learned that quite a few women had been told that the man was a victim of a serious venereal disease. Others had been told something unsavory about him – his name not being mentioned, but his description being, at all times, unmistakable.

The end results in this case were satisfactory. The clairvoyant left the country. The man became convinced of his wife’s genuine desirability and the wife, being sensible and tired of the storm through which she had gone, was happy to have love restored and the affair at an end.

Genital and Other Deformities

When we consider the number of people who are born devoid of such parts of the body as the bridge of the nose, a hand, a foot, and even an eye, or with deformities such as clubfoot, hunchback, etc., we can hardly believe that all people will be born with nondeformed genital organs. And, after thousands of years of what we idealize as civilization, we still look askance at the deformed.

In recent years humanitarians and scientists have combined to bring some degree of help and correction to the deformed. The clubbed foot now often can be corrected and the harelip, cleft palate, and similar deformities may be rendered unnoticeable. Such deformities of the genital organs as vaginal atresia, hypertrophy of the clitoris, hypospadias and epispadias, as well as failure of the testicles to descend, are in nearly all instances, amenable to treatment and correction.

Just as idiots, imbeciles, infants with hydrocephalus, and the feeble minded still are considered as skeletons to be kept largely in the family closet, so are genital deformities treated with the rankest of ignorance and, intentionally or unintentionally, children who might find corrective help and live useful and happy lives, are condemned to a life of torture as a result of ignorance and a false pride born of ignorance.

I’ve known families who kept their epileptic members shut up in a dark closet when visitors other than the family’s most intimate friends were about. And I’ve known of instances where these unfortunate individuals were tied up with ropes as a measure of restraint to prevent them from becoming obnoxious to family intimates.

The ideas of pride leading warm-hearted people to commit atrocities against their loved ones have been fostered by an ignorance we are but slowly outgrowing – if at all. Our vast school system and compulsory school attendance laws are doing nothing to relieve a form of ignorance that is damning as it is appalling. One reason is that we lack teachers and another is that ignorance makes it almost a crime to speak the word sex aloud in our public school buildings or on public school grounds.

Little John Jimmy Doe has a medical certificate excusing him from school attendance because of poor physical health. The reason given by an honest though ignorantly kind family physician may be heart trouble. But John Jimmy may be the victim of obstetrical paralysis. His father who has become pious believes, along with other members of the family, that the little fellow’s trouble is a visitation of God for the father’s masturbation, or just possibly for the child’s grandfather’s indiscretion because the grandfather once "had a disease." Pious grandmother, not being of the confessing type, secretly blames herself because she had a few affairs, and the ignorant mother of the child says nothing but feels that she should tell "pa,." little John Jimmy’s father, that she masturbated quite a few times herself and that she may be to blame.

Crippled children have been kept out of the public schools because the patrons feared their precious nondeformed children might be contaminated by a bad disease which the crippled one’s father or grandfather had and which was passed on to the child because a jealous Lord-God passed on the iniquity to visit the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation of them "that hate Me."

I’ve known of instances wherein cross-eyed children were kept out of school and not permitted around when the family had visitors.

Naturally when one recalls all of the deformed people one sees in large crowds my statements may seem like exaggerations. Those who read this book will, however, in the large majority of instances, themselves personally know of at least one and perhaps a score of such incidents as I have described.

Of all deformities, the genital deformity is the most hush-hush. During the last war of general record, when I was medical examiner for the induction and recruiting service, the facilities of our station were loaned (when not otherwise in use) for the purpose of examining boy scouts about to go on summer encampment. Having had considerable experience as a general examiner, I was asked to volunteer to conduct the major part of the examination of some 200 or more boys en masse. I was happy to agree.

After the examinations were finished and I walked down the streets of the town where I was stationed, I met a lad about 11 whose family I knew. It came to my mind that this lad was a scout and the he had not been present for the examination. I suggested that I’d missed him and he said his father did not approve of him going to camp. Later the father spoke of the matter to me. "There’s something wrong with my boy, Doc," he confided. "When I was his age I was about as much a man as I am now. I guess my boy just won’t be a man and maybe I’m to blame. I masturbated an awful lot and it must be showing up in my boy’s privates – they’re just not developed." This father’s memory of his own physique when he was an 11-year-old boy was faulty. His ignorant impression of the harmfulness of masturbation had obscured his memory of his sex physique. I assured him that his impression was wrong and persuaded him to send his boy up for examination so that he might go with the crowd. But I failed to convince this father that it was not harmful to masturbate. Just six years later (when the boy was 17) I received the following letter from his father:

"Dear Dr, Cauldwell: You knew so many people in Lafayette you may not remember me but, it was my boy you sent to the scout’s camp that summer. You told me not to worry about him. I’ve come onto a lot of your books and different writing and I’m about convinced you were right.

"The boy you said would be all right turned out to be-to my worry and relief. He got into trouble with a girl a few months ago and there’s no doubt about his guilt. So that boy now has made a grandpappy out of me. I’m sort of proud of him and thank you for getting me to let him go to scout camp."

* * *

Deformities rarely result from venereal disease although people in general are not to be blamed for believing that they do. A comparatively few years ago the medical profession taught that nearly all major deformities resulted from syphilis and that masturbation caused most of the rest of them.

Even today if you walk into a clinic with a slight limp (not plainly the result of a recent injury or broken leg) or with a queer gait (which could be the result of poor posture or ill-fitting shoes) the average medico calls for a test for syphilis at once. Thumb through recent medical texts and you will see less of it, but turn the pages of a medical text published prior to five or 10 years ago and you’ll find that hundreds of diseases and diseased conditions were considered to be possibly related to syphilis.

Just one decade ago women who habitually aborted were frequently given antiluetic treatment in the belief that syphilis, although not demonstrable by tests, was responsible. Since the discovery of the Rh blood factor in 1941, the old bug syphilis has been less blamed. It is definitely known today that Rh incompatibility is a leading cause of miscarriage. (For more data about the Rh factor see my Haldeman-Julius booklet. Positive and Negative Blood – The Rhesus Factor.)

Ignorance Nurtures Superstition

According to Science Service, a survey of student nurses (of the female sex) was conducted recently at the new Jersey State Hospital, to determine their sex knowledge. These nurses were in their third year of training. The survey indicated an appalling degree of ignorance.

Unfortunately doctors are not generally as well informed as they should be about sexology. There are doctors today who agree that masturbation is seriously injurious, and that any deviation from the man above position with organ union in sexual intercourse is a perversion under any and all circumstances.

This is merely a matter of moralistic opinion, derived from what a child may be taught during his first years of life (usually up to age eight).

There are other specific matters on which all doctors should be positively informed, but it comes to light often that not all of them are. A decade ago I was invited to sit in on a confidential court investigation. The purpose was to seek to determine, before a charge was placed, whether a woman who mutilated her infant son was sane (capable of determining between right and wrong) and whether she should be sent to an institution or tried for a crime.

My status was that of a guest, due to the fact that I was a physician in federal employ and it was doubtful whether my superior officers would have considered it according to regulations for me to have acted officially in such a matter.

A physician who stood exceptionally high in the community, in local medical circles and in politics, was asked to lead the medical part of the investigation.

It was developed that the mother, who was at liberty on her own recognizance, pleaded insanity and said that her act had resulted from such intense desire to bear a female child and her penitence, at the birth of the child, that she had failed to keep her mind pure enough to influence the birth of a baby of the desired sex.

The patriarchal physician said that such matters were of God, that he believed that the woman had recovered from her insanity, and that she should not be punished or even sent to an institution for the mentally ill.

Another doctor, well known in the locality, with due respect to the elderly physician, said that it was his opinion that the woman was sane, that she had been sane when she mutilated her son (cut his genitals away) and that it was and old fogy idea that a woman could influence the sex of her unborn child. Several lawyers then voiced their beliefs. The judge presided informally. He kept looking at me as if inviting me to say something, but I definitely did not belong in that closely sacked up and highly incestuous community. I listened when the third doctor, a fairly young man, arose and said that there was something in the medical books to disprove the ideas of prenatal influence but that he could not recall what it was and that it probably was not relevant to the case. It was at this point that the judge asked whether I could set them straight on this point.

I explained that the male furnishes the sex-determining chromosomes and that the ovum is neutral. The female, therefore, has nothing whatever to do with the sex to which her child will belong and the sex is determined at the instant of conception.

The senior physician arose to his feet, pointed a finger at me and opened his mouth. I was surprised to see him sink slowly back into his seat. He turned to the judge and said that he’d read something like that authoritatively somewhere.

The youngest physician present said he’d been trying to remember the facts that I’d given and suggested that he could bring the data to the courthouse within a matter of minutes if he could be excused. The judge said it would be unnecessary – that he’d take my word for it. (I learned that he had devoted considerable study to the subject and probably was far better versed, technically, on the mechanics of conception than I was.)

There was no doubt in my mind that the mother who mutilated her son was criminally inclined. Two days later, when I asked someone in a position to know about the disposition of the case or whether it was in status quo, he told me that no charge had been filed and that the poor baby had developed non specific meningitis and was dead. It was medical opinion that the mutilation had not influenced the disease and legal opinion decided against action in the case.

I learned later that the woman had developed a mortal hatred for her husband and that she had mutilated her child in a rage because she refused to remain the mother of a child of her husband’s sex, who might grow up to be like him. She believed the child would die and hoped it would. She wanted it to be rid, according to the words repeated to me, of its "hideous genital organs."

There is so much new knowledge being discovered every day that no physician under the sun can keep up to the exact minute with all medical and related findings. But physicians in general are appallingly lax in their efforts to keep up with developments in the sexological field.

Several days ago a young physician who is what one would call, in common parlance, up and coming, lamented that he "was so damned busy he didn’t have time to read." He spoke the truth.

A physician who takes time out now and then for sexological practice told me that all of the doctors in his locality are so busy that they read only the most essential articles in medical journals and the labels on the proprietary drugs.

Authors, editors, publishers and lecturers have it in their power to remove the stigma of general sexological ignorance from the mass character to the extent of their resources. Without heavy medical support, they may fight a losing battle.

People once were steeped in supernatural beliefs which were damning. Far too many are so steeped now. But a new kind of superstition has grown up in a field where it has no rightful or intelligent place. The field is that of medicine.

Firms able to pay for extravagant advertising use the scheme: "Doctors say," or "More doctors use so and so than any other leading brand." It pays or the advertisers would give the gag a rest. Doctors are too busy to conduct surveys to refute all of the claims attributed to them. Some of them are too busy to care, while others are amused and quite a few consider the propaganda good advertising and good will ambassadorship for the medical profession.

The remedy for a lack of information within the ranks of medicine may be one thing or it may be another. It seems to be time for medical leaders to begin to recognize the need for drastic changes in the plan of medical education.

As long as people believe that gonads can be transplanted and that they will thus function perfectly, and that the sex of a human being can be changed after the sex determining chromosome has united with an ovum, the honoured and worthy science of medicine is at fault.

One’s Sex Cannot Be Changed

The information given thus far should have made it clear to intelligent people (people capable of reasoning regardless of whether they mispronounce every other word they read) that once the "X" chromosome carried by the spermatozoon has united with an ovum the sex of the product of conception is, and will be, female. When a "Y" chromosome enters into a state of syngamy with an ovum the sex of the product of conception is male and it will remain male until the death of the product of the union of the male and female elements of fertility.

External alterations in the appearance of the genital organs can but give a false impression. One can change to the clothes of the opposite sex and alter certain little matters of appearance, and one will have just as true a change of sex as when the genitals have been altered to suit the clothes.

The sex-transmutationist is a sick person. The transvestist may be a thoroughly delightful individual, charming, entertaining – even daring.

The transvestist is an individual who is willing to indulge a harmless eccentricity. In all but a few isolated instances neither he or she willingly give up his sexuality. I’ve said before and feel impelled to repeat, that transvestist should never be confused with homosexuals. The fact that either a male or a female is a transvestist (one having a desire to wear, and given to the practice of wearing, the clothing of the opposite sex) is not an indication that even so much as an inclination toward homosexuality exists. However, homosexuals (of either or both sexes) are frequently inclined toward transvestism. I hold that these are matters of individual choice and am not in the least critical of either the transvestists or the homosexuals.

Some of my readers have shown an inclination to be rather politely inquisitive, but none have ever asked me any questions as to my personal inclinations. I believe that the average intelligent reader does not find the question arising in his mind. Recently a layman who pretended to have great knowledge of homosexuals and homosexuality, and who was a homosexual according to his own statements, incurred my public criticism by making untenable statements. Evidently he was incensed by my informative and necessarily critical remarks. He wrote me: " If you are not a homosexual how are you an authority on homosexuals and homosexuality? You write like a bisexual who uses the outlet most convenient at the moment." I’ll return to this man in a moment.

An extremely friendly male transvestist wrote: "I’ve done a considerable amount of research and find that you and Mr. Haldeman-Julius (who has published your several booklets on the subject) have probably created the largest bibliography on transvestism of recent times and perhaps of all times." He then went on to tell me that he was a thoroughly heterosexual male, happily married, a father, and comfortably prosperous. His wife was not displeased because of his eccentricity and was quite helpful in her selection of many lovely garments for him. He then asked: "Do you have and extensive wardrobe, Doctor? Evidently you do have, but it intrigues me to ask."

I explained to the homosexual critic that my knowledge of homosexuals and homosexuality is legitimately scientific and that an engineer does not have to be an engine to know as much about engines as one possibly may know. I explained further that I learned about heterosexuality earlier than I did about autosexuality-unless I learned something about the latter in infancy and that constitutes a stage of my life which I fail, for some reason, to recall quite clearly. Many homosexuals find it quite inconvenient, according to their own statements, to relieve their homosexual urges. I have no bisexual urges and bisexuality would not be a convenience – hence heterosexual release is always most convenient. I am what I am because environment made me so and not because of any special intelligence I had or any instinct with which I was early (or prenatally) endowed by Nature. And this is as true of individuals – all individuals – with all forms of sexual personality.

My transvestist friend’s attention was directed to my Haldeman-Julius booklets on Nudism. I’ve never fancied myself wearing a skirt or other garment usually worn by females. I’ve never had such an inclination but if I had I would exercise my right to please myself in the matter. I do have a wardrobe, as I assured my friend. I’ve some wearable suits that are several years old (Coat, vest and trousers.) The last suit I bought is three or four years old. I’m due for another one soon, because there’s likely to be a rubber shortage and my present suits may need vulcanising almost any time.

One of my readers who corresponded with me for some time was under psychoanalytic treatment. (Fortunately for him, I suppose, he could afford it.) He was, he assured me, unchangeably desirous of sex transmutation and not for the sake of sex. Indeed, he didn’t want any. He wanted to do medical research in the interest of humanity. He believed, according to his letters, that he could work less fettered as a female.

In time this correspondent wrote: "I see in your statements about the impossibility of sex transmutation that you are hostilely opposed to it and I find that our correspondence no longer interests me."

I harbor no hostility toward anything anyone wishes to do if the violation of individual rights of others is avoided. Indeed, were sex transmutation possible I would have no more objection to helping an individual through transmutation than I have to writing a friendly letter. Any other attitude is not that of the scientist.

As matters stand, I regard the destruction of any healthy organ of the body an act which either borders on criminality or is criminal. Wanton waste of any kind represents destructivism. Why destroy anything that is good?

A trite saying is that about one convinced against one’s will being of the same opinion still, and it is worth repeating because it compares with a fact unchangeable in the genetics of man. One may have one’s genital organs mutilated or removed and may, in certain instances, succeed in attaining plastic representations of the genitals of the opposite sex, but one will remain of the sex into which one was born. Yes – even of the sex in which one is conceived.

Sex may be predetermined in an unknown number of instances. When this occurs the female (mother-to-be) has a part in the predetermination. She is, when predetermination measures succeed, only a vessel or an instrument. By chemically changing the secretions of the female genital tract, an environment hostile to either the X or the Y chromosome may be created. When such efforts are successful the sex of the child may be said to be predetermined.

There’s a broad line of distinction between the predetermination of sex and sex transmutation. Professor John McLeod of Cornell learned how to dose spermatozoa with poison gas compounds and render them inactive. Antidotes revived them. Some such procedure employed on semen to be used for artificial insemination might succeed perfectly in predetermining the sex of a person.
  

Environment – Benefactor or Villain

Environment may be either the villain in one’s life or the benefactor. We inherit a great deal from our ancestors. An excellent resume of this will be found in my Is Sexual Sterilization Easy, published by Haldeman-Julius Publications. In writing that booklet I had access to a vast amount of data which was collected by Birthright, Inc., of Princeton, N.J., and various scientific organizations. I dealt with the hereditary tendency toward certain disease and the claims that various diseases can be eradicated with two or three generations by what some call selective sterilization (a term I, too, have used) but which I call selective breeding. Since that booklet was written a vast amount of critical and pertinent data have come to light. It has been learned, for instance, through genetic research and experimentation, that we inherit far less from our forebears than was formerly believed. We evidently do not inherit the genes for genius. If there are enough recessive genes toward feeblemindedness, or poor ability to comprehend, we may not be too intelligent. However, according to the latest information (contained in numerous heavy tomes of recent release) we inherit far more on the physical plane than on the intellectual one. This means that we inherit the genes which may cause us to have large frames, small frames, a tendency toward obesity or thinness, toward coarseness or delicacy of features, and toward strength and agility or weakness and lethargy. All of these may be influenced later by environment, nutrition and various factors related to environment and nutrition.

If we inherit powerful genes of the recessive kind which cause us to be feebleminded, we will be feebleminded, yet a friendly and cooperative environment may enable us to go through life as self-supporting and self-respecting individuals. An unfriendly environment may send the feebleminded child to the greatest depths of his genetic heritage.

Males do not inherit genes which cause them to desire to become females, and the same rule applies to females. No one is born a homosexual, a bestialist (more properly a person who prefers sexual contacts with the lower animals), a cunnilinguist, etc., etc. People who develop these patterns of sexual behavior (or personality) are environmentally influenced to do so, just as heterosexuals are thus influenced.

We’ve heard of the born salesman, the born musician, the born artist, the born criminal, and especially of the born homosexualist. I wonder if anyone has ever heard of the born whore?

It is as reasonable to say that a female is a born whore (that she was predestined to be a whore and that nothing could have prevented her from becoming a whore) as to say that one is born a homosexual, bestialist, cunnilinguist, salesman, musician or artist. Do we ever hear that anyone was a born common laborer?

Doesn’t it seem foolish to assume that an individual murders because he was a born murderer? How could one who has never murdered be called a murderer at birth? (How could it be done in intrauterine life?) And isn’t it rank ignorance to assert (or believe) that one is born predestined to murder? (Or is it the kind of feeblemindedness that grows out of mental lethargy?)

The sex transmutationist (one desiring it – not one performing it, because the latter is impossible) is born with the least inherent desire concerning his or her sex. The desire develops as a result of environment and environmental (which is social) influence. I am of the opinion that the desire is always false and that there are individuals who have gone through mutilative operations because they lost their mental equilibrium.

There was the case of Einar Wegener of Denmark, and artist who eventually went through a so-called sex transmutation operation and (although born a man) was legally declared a woman by the government of Denmark. Wegener was issued a passport under a legally accepted feminine name: Lili Elbe. But Einar Wegener did not become a woman, and Einar Wegener enjoyed only the pleasure of simple accomplishments in the role of a woman. He paid dearly in an untold number of ways for his few pleasures and lived but a short while after reaching his new, and evidently to him, glorious status. If he was able to accomplish his desires he was entitled to do so and if the brief pleasures his acts brought into his life were worth the apparently shortened life span (to him) then who has a right to raise a voice against it?

Einar Wegener inherited delicate features and a delicate constitution from his ancestors. Definitely he inherited masculinity through the Y chromosome furnished by the male parent. But he inherited an environment which conduced to his dissatisfaction with his maleness and encouraged him to wish to be a female. His environment drove him to that state of mental unbalance which caused him to seek a daring surgeon more interested in his surgical skill than in the happiness or the unhappiness of the race of man.

Data on the Wegener case (better known as the Lili Elbe case) were never made available through medical sources. The principal source of information of any kind was through Wegener’s biographer. The biographer, Niels Hoyer, was a long-time (I believe a lifetime) friend both of Einar and Einar’s wife Grete.

The strange and unusual biography of Einar Wegener, who legally became Lili Elbe, was published in the United States several years ago by McGraw-Hill under the title, Man into Woman.

It is logical to invite the attention of readers to the fact that the medical profession in the United States and elsewhere paid scant attention to the report of the "sex transmutation." An authentic case of surgically (or surgically and medically) induced sex transmutation at any time within the decades of the 20^th century would have created universal interest within the ranks of medical men. In Sexology for September and October, 1946, I gave a reportorial version of the Hoyer biography of Wegener under the title, "A Man Becomes a Woman." On rereading the article at this time I regret that when I wrote it more than four (nearly five years) ago, I did not explain definitely that the article was reportorial rather than positively factual. At that time I had had a broad background of sexological study, practice and experience. Since that time I have engaged solely in medical and sexological research, writing and editing. My 134 booklets written for Haldeman-Julius Publications have involved research which has vastly increased my knowledge of sexology. These booklets can be read by the average reader in 30 days of eight hours each of easy reading time. My research for them has covered several years of intensive study, serious work and concentration. To be able to gain the enlightenment a pleasant reading of this library affords within such a short time as a month is a privilege I never expect to enjoy at any price. My scientific knowledge of sex transmutation when I wrote " A Man Becomes a Woman," reportorially, some five years ago was the same as it is today. My knowledge of how best to present facts was at that time, in its infancy. At that time I could write reportorially and say, "According to thus and so." Today I cannot write reportorially without explaining the latest and best know authentic information on the subject reported on and thus comparing it for the reader’s benefit with the reportorial material.

What I have just explained affords another illustration of the effects of environment. Wegener went through surgery which destroyed his genital organs and gave him sterile substitutes. His actions were the direct result of an environment he might have avoided had he been better informed. My environment as a writer has been healthful and has led me to write fact rather than to slant reportorially. I want readers to feel that they are in a good environment when they have several of my booklets at hand and within reach. Healthy minds will be able to grasp the benefits of such an environment. This applies equally to unhealthy minds. Warped minds may find my writing on any subject a sour grape equivalent. The reason is that warped minds must remain in their land of make-believe. They are incapable of escape through reality and factualness.

Unhealthy minds, environmentally influenced by the factual data in this booklet, may become healthy and give up untenable ideas which father untenable desires. Warped minds will continue in their poor land of poorer escapism. These minds will give the lie to every fact which has been painstakingly written into theses pages.

Transmutatiopn Impotence

The desire for sex transmutation sometimes results from a lethargic form of impotence in either sex. The male imagines that were he a female sexual power would be his without effort. Conversely, the female thinks that were she a male she would naturally be sexually powerful. Many a case of desire for sex transmutation may be relieved through proper measures directed toward the relief of the condition of impotence suffered by the affected person.

Patient X called on a psychiatrist to see if the psychiatrist could tell him what was wrong with him. Having been taught that there are miracles and that fairy tales come true, he expected the psychiatrist to be clairvoyant and hence to be able to look at him and tell him just exactly what was wrong. For several minutes he played tag with the doctor. When the doctor rather sternly told him to come down to earth and tell him just what he was troubled about, he dallied by saying that if the doctor did not know he probably could be of little help. However, he was anxious to tell someone just what he wanted and once in the psychiatrist’s presence one doctor seemed as good as another. He explained that he wanted to be made into a female.

The wise doctor did not come to the point and tell him at once that it could not be done. Instead he examined the patient to determine whether there was anything seriously wrong with him physically. He found the patient to be in excellent health generally. He then inquired as to the patient’s potency. The patient was capable of having intercourse if all circumstances were thoroughly favorable. Circumstances seldom were favourable

Why did the patient desire a change of sex? In the first place the patient had been reared to think of himself as a girl instead of as a boy. In the second place, when he had first had sexual relations shortly after puberty he had had great desire but had found it necessary to put forth a great deal of effort to experience an erection and to accomplish penetration. He had been impressed that it was so much easier for the girl who apparently had to do nothing but remain receptive.

As a small child Patient X had, when he was supposed to sleep, observed his parents in the act of intercourse on numerous occasions. He’d always felt that he should be like his mother and fantasied himself in her position. Rarely had he fantasied himself in this father’s position and each time he had thus fantasied he had observed his diminutive genital and decided that it could never be as large and strong as his male parent’s genital. On a number of occasions his mother had told him that at the proper time a surgeon would change him into a girl. Asked whether he had been frightened by the idea of surgery, he answered that he had not. He had undergone tonsillectomy and circumcision and had not minded. He had been anesthetized for both operations and had been disappointed on awakening to learn that he had not been made into a girl. He resented having had but a part of his genital (the foreskin) cut away. Several times he had made preparations to cut his organs and split himself. The fear of pain had not stopped him but the fear of blood had. Once he’d seen a man accidentally cut his foot deeply with an axe and had observed that the flesh stood apart and that there had been no severe hemorrhage. After this he had procured an axe with the determination of "splitting" himself a vagina. He had been confident of success and had failed only because he lost his balance when he tried to strike a hard enough blow with the axe. He’d struck his thigh as a result, and the pain had been severe. A scar gave mute corroboration of the patient’s story.

The average individual would shrug his shoulder on learning of such a case and render the verdict that the man was crazy. The psychiatrist showed a deep interest and told his patient that he was convinced that something could be done for him. He did not explain how, but in the course of a few consultations he led his patient to understand himself and his condition. He helped the patient to let it dawn on him that he had been victimized by environment and selfishness and encouraged him to sense his strength and his power to rise above the infantile training he had been given until well into maturity. He helped his patient to gain the assurance that he was, and could be as potent as any man. Patient X made a good recovery within three months and became so confident of himself that he married without thinking of experimenting with a prostitute (which many men do as an excuse under various circumstances involving some form of impotency). He was a competent husband, evidently always eager for his wife in their intimate relationship.

Patient Z, a softly curved female, presented herself to a sexologist and expressed the desire to become a male. The sexologist examined her and asked about her sexual experience, having found her to be in excellent health and quite feminine. She had had a considerable amount of sexual experience and had never known a climax. Her ideas of what constituted the climax were vague. Some of the males with whom she had consorted had told her that she should ejaculate just as heavily and firmly as they did. She had never had sexual experience with a male who was in the least impotent. Even men with whom she had not had sexual relations had placed her hand on their genitals and she had been impressed that the genitals were always large, firm, erect and pulsating.

This patient was severely frustrated. One genuine climax (and the truth) when she first began having sexual experience with males would have prevented her from entering into the state of moroseness into which she fell. She had never made any attempt to mutilate herself or to alter her sexual appearance. She hadn’t learned that she had a clitoris and that it had a purpose. She had engaged in athletics to the full extent of her physical capacity in order to acquire a semblance of masculinity, but her muscles had never become hardened and her body contours had remained exceedingly feminine. She had no idea how a surgeon might go about doing a transmutation of sex. She had an idea that the first procedure would be several months of hormone treatment and that during this time she would develop a coarse voice and that a beard would appear on her face. A boy whom she believed to be fairly well informed had told her that all females have penes in their vaginas and that doctors were capable of making them come out. She had felt as far inside her vagina as possible and believed that she had found the head of her vaginally concealed penis. She did not know that her fingers had contacted the cervix.

Two lengthy consultations set Patient Z on the road to sexual and sociological adjustment. The patient developed a temporary crush on the sexologist, but as he remarked, although no epitaph had been written over his sexual powers, it did not pay to go too far as an instructor and he contrived to lead her to recognize the extremely good points in a young man whom he had given a premarital course of sexological instruction.

These are true cases, recorded with exactness. With the exception of adjustment they have their analogues in many thousands of people, some of whom we often think we know quite well, and we possibly do, without guessing that they are burdened with an eccentricity of psychotic proportions.

Our Wonderful Anatomy and Physiology

Anatomy, the science which treats of the structure of organisms, and physiology, the science of the functions of organisms, are studies far more wonderful, even more mysterious, than nuclear physics. The trans-sexual, that individual who desires his sex transmuted, gives little thought to these important subjects. He first visualizes what he wants to be, which is, of course, a full-fledged member of the sex to which he does not belong. Next, he is carried away in fantasy. He then reads, or hears, medical and scientific propaganda which was never intended to have the effect it does on him. And, perchance, he sees moving pictures in which ham actors make worse surgeons or physicians. He is readily sold on the idea that synthetic hormones, or hormones manufactured anywhere, except in his own body, are capable of greater accomplishments than would be the conquering of interplanetary space. (This has been conquered for the purpose of scientific and general knowledge, but not insofar as traversing it by any solid substance in concerned.) He conceives that surgery can duplicate the natural organs of the body. He knows what he thinks he wants and often, like a spoiled child who thinks another person should be able to do anything to please him, he decides definitely that he desires sex transmutation and that scientists can accomplish this for him. He centers his attention on the genitals and the gonads; and if a male, on the breasts, while if a female, on the hairy face and a deep voice. The elements of sex transmutation thus are thought of in terms of penes, gonads, vaginas, breasts and beard. Rarely is the male specifically concerned about having a uterus but his dreams eventually include a uterus and having a baby.

The male rarely thinks of such intricate structures as the vaginal glands, the glands of Bartholin, various other delicate and highly important glands or even a clitoris. Principally he’ll settle for a vagina and breasts, but he fantasies ovaries, perhaps fallopian tubes, and the ability to have a baby.

The female wants a penis. That comes first of all. She has an idea that her ovaries may be left intact and that everything the testicles can do may be compensated by injections of implantations of the male sex hormone, testosterone. If she thinks of testes she rarely considers the important vas, the urethral glands, the seminal vesicles, Cowpers glands or the prostrate. Nor does she think of all of the intricate little mechanisms involved when the male has coitus. She has an idea that an artificial (or grafted) penis, some whiskers and a deep voice will take care of about everything.

The male dreams of menstruating without giving a thought to the delicate glands, organs tissues, and processes involved in the menstrual function.

One of my correspondents wrote that he was confident that he would eventually find a surgeon who could accomplish the wonderful change, sex transmutation, for him. He said: "I dream of the day when I shall be able to menstruate and when I can enter the company of women in the public rest rooms and change my pad alongside the best of them. I often wear a pad now and get a thrill out of staining it with red ink or mercurochrome. I go often, then, to the bathroom, and push the pad slightly away from me so that I can see the blood color and it seems to be exactly as though I am menstruating and my dream has come true." It was impossible to explain to him the necessity of the action of folliculin acting through the blood-stream and thus stimulating the growth of a membraneous lining in the uterus in order that menstruation may occur. My opinion was, however, that he probably would have run from a surgeon who offered, as he proposed, to experiment on him.

One woman wrote me that she had constructed a natural-appearing artificial penis by using extra firm paraffin and coating the glans with properly colored sealing wax. She hoped some day to have her sex changed completely to that of the male, but meanwhile she delighted in dressing as a man and standing at the urinals in public comfort stations with men. Her dummy penis, of large enough proportions to attract considerable notice, was fitted at the base with a syringe which she filled with amber-colored water. She often stood far from the urinal and squirted the fluid hard against its posterior wall just to attract attention. When she wished to stage several performances she wore a water belt of soft rubber around her waist. By releasing a clamp she could readily refill her "bladder," and promptly be ready for another performance. On her first great adventure she hoboed in every direction across the United States and returned home with what she considered her first instalment on transmutation surgery. By displaying her genital and urinary prowess in public washrooms she often scooped up several dollars showered at her feet after a performance. Fleet of foot and accomplished in judo she frequently pretended to accept the advances of male homosexuals, insisted on a fee, and then ran "like a fleet-footed Indian," after she had the coveted greenback in her hand.

This woman’s idea of sex transmutation was quite simple. She was willing to compromise on a healthy penis hastily removed from a dying man and promptly brought to the operation table, on which she would be waiting, and grafted onto her.

The wonderful anatomy and the equally wonderful physiology of the human body is never considered seriously by those who fantasy and form dogmatic opinions of what science can accomplish which is, to interpret them, just about anything.

A high school girl who had become intensely interested in biology outlined to me her idea of how a skilled surgeon could change her into a boy. As she proceeded with her outline she had the surgeon tying blood vessels together. She seemed to have no idea of the wonderful system of valves we have in our blood vessels to control circulation and to prevent fatal hemorrhage in specific instances. She did not know that blood vessel anastamosis (joining together of blood vessels with a continuous channel preserved) is an extremely delicate procedure requiring greater skill than all but a comparatively few men of medicine have mastered.

Both medicine and surgery are wonderful sciences and they necessarily go hand in hand. What these sciences have accomplished for the comfort and happiness of mankind and the lower animals should never be discounted. But, as Thomas A. Edison is credited with having said, "Until man learns to imitate a blade of grass Nature can laugh at all of his scientific achievements." By imitation was meant duplication in every respect, structure by structure and function by function.

Males invariably visualize an amputated penis when they fantasy an artificial vagina created by a surgeon. Why? Their psychological image involves getting rid of the undesired organ as quickly and readily as possible. Furthermore, simply cutting something off seems simple. And, of course, there always is a stump – perhaps a base for a graft if fancy turns to a change back to the original sex. I do not recall that any male ever spoke or wrote to me of dissecting out the penis by its "roots."

Let’s consider a part of what happens when most of the penis has been surgically removed. The stump may atrophy. If the stump is cut extremely close there will not be enough hollow bodies to permit noticeable congestion. Our hypothetical amputee has been successful in having an artificial vagina made of a loop of small intestine. And so – he sallies forth, all dolled up like a tender young maiden, to sample the pleasures of Eros. Let us assume that he is of bisexual nature. He meets one of the charming young girls who always was a girl. Something about her appeals to his erotic nature. It may be her perfume, or it may be the tilt of her hips when she walks. Or, perchance her breasts and lips appeal. He becomes aroused. Arousal involves an awakening of the sex center in the brain. Soon this center begins sending impulses to the erection center in the spine. The impulses overflow, some of them reach the short penile stump. It congests. There is a mild sensation of swelling in the region. The sensitive nerves respond. An odd sensation, perhaps like a twitching nerve or a tickling, even a bubbling is felt. The anal sphincters may contract just as they do when an undisturbed penis moves slightly upward and downward in response to pulsations when erect. The impulses suddenly cease because there’s no proper place for them to go. The feeling passes. Our pseudotransmuted individual may sense hot flushes, even brief nausea, as a result of a frustrated nature. His interest cools and he feels let down and possibly weak. He recovers and moves on.

His next stimulus comes from a male who appeals to him. He can do things to and with the agreeable male. But the male isn’t homosexually or bisexually inclined. His advances excite the sex center in the brain of our hypothetical transmutee. He doesn’t learn the truth, eventually relieves himself in the vaginal sleeve which once served to digest hamburger, lettuce, onions and such, and goes his way satisfied. Our transmutee has gone through an experience which, physiologically, is quite the same as when his erotic impulses overflowed to the tune of a maiden’s appeal.

If now our transmutee encounters a male homosexual of a bisexual nature, chiefly inclined toward homosexuality, the encounter seems well and good for the bisexual and practically perfect for the transmutee. But it cannot turn out that way. In the end the most that he can experience is what has been described as a mild form of psychological orgasm. And this is the best the can ever hope for.

The female transmutee with the clitoris intact may experience complete and satisfying orgasm. With the clitoris, the vagina and other female genitals removed, her frustration is greater than the frustration of the male if – and we may well use emphasis – indeed she experiences sexual desire.

Anatomy and physiology, as well as the psychology of the basic emotions, contrive to appear as a conspiracy against the individual desiring to become a sex transmutee. This must impress those who have place credenced in the impossible as extremely strange, by reason of the fact that an individual of either sex with his sexual and genital systems undisturbed may experience complete sexual (orgastic) satisfaction with members of the same sex, with members of the opposite sex, with animals, and autoerotically when stimulated by fetishes, acts such as voyeurism, exhibitionism, peeping-tomism, etc.
  

Conclusion

The sexologist who is interested in the actualities is not biased against any form of sexuality. He wouldn’t object in the least if Citizen X, desiring it, changed his sex on alternate days were that possible. He knows, however, that actual transmutation of sex cannot be accomplished by medical and surgical measures. He therefore recognizes maladjustment of individuals who become obsessed with the idea that their sex can be changed and he knows that maladjustment of this nature creates unhappiness for those who have an obsession for the impossible, as well as unhappiness for those who must contend with or try to appease them. The serious sexologist is interested in helping sexually maladjusted people to become happy, well-adjusted individuals. He knows that this contributes immeasurably to the sum total of human happiness and efficiency and that it leads to a higher mass intelligence level.

As sexologist I am not alone in my desire to help the sexually maladjusted to resolve their problems and thereby become well-adjusted and, therefore, happy. In this connection I should like to invite attention to the fact that one doesn’t need a doctor’s degree in order to be a sexologist. It is true that a sexologist competent to practice sexology in the professional sense should have all the basic training of a physician. Only when one has such training can one thoroughly understand the sexological functions of mind and body as well as the sexological possibilities of these two inseparable entities.

One may be a sexologist without attempting to treat sexological disorders. The now famous

Dr. A. C. Kinsey, whose doctorate is not that of the physician, is a versatile sexologist. His versatility revolves around the axis of sexological facts. Various authors, editors, teachers and social workers are sexologists because they are versed in sexology – the science of sex.

Some of our marriage counselors are sexologists worthy the name and are, through wise counsel, capable of resolving a broad variety of sexual conflicts. Now and then a lawyer or a judge may be found who is so well versed in the fundamentals of sex as to be entitled to be considered a sexologist worthy the name.

An infinitesimally small part of the science of sexology pertains solely to the medical field. Aside from the basic fundamentals which represent the distinctions between the sexes, the greater part of sexological therapy falls within the psychological and sociological fields. Of course sex education, within itself, may be therapeutic. Knowledge alone cures many ill.

A letter from a colleague who is an outstanding physician and sexologist gave the brief details of a case of impotence he had just dealt with. The impotent husband liked his wife but felt toward her as a sister. His viewpoint was corrected by suitable counsel and he became potent and satisfied. It wasn’t necessary to use a drug or to employ any instrumental therapy or surgery.

There are individuals who, because of an unfavourable early environment, grow up wishing that they were members of the sex to which they do not belong. A great many of these find release through the sexual outlets of their choice. Others are unable to escape the trap which was prepared for them by uninformed, and frequently extremely close, relatives. The sincere sexologist finds himself facing a difficult problem when he tries to convince them that there is a way to resolve their conflicts but that there is no way out through sex transmutation.

Early instruction by the use of slides and motion pictures if possible, and if not through the most vivid picture illustrations available, would help every individual unfavorably influenced environmentally to understand the important anatomical features of the genital systems of both male and female. Such instruction would not, as the moralists delight in proclaiming, lead any child into sexual promiscuity. Children usually experiment and only a few find enough satisfaction in their experiments to prevent them from abandoning them within a short while.

Some of our finest fathers and mothers did their brief experimenting with sex when they were quite small. I’ve never known of an adult who went through this stage of experimentation who arrived at maturity any the worse for the experience.

Society is filled with people of every conceivable sexual personality. Yet society cries out against forms of sexuality other than heterosexuality and against numerous forms of heterosexual practices. Society fights sex education in the public schools. In doing this society fails to understand that the heterosexuality it cherishes, or professes to cherish, would be increased and other forms of sexuality decreased were genuine and thorough sex education made an integral part of each child’s training. This, it must be said in frankness, cannot be accomplished in classes where the hush-sex attitude separates the sexes.

There is no way at present of knowing just what proportion of the population is represented by the would-be sex transmutees. A national survey might fail to be accurately revealing. I know that members of both sexes who fancy themselves in the role of sex transmutes represent a considerable portion of our total population. Those who permit the fancy to become and obsession rather than a mere eccentric inclination have no large-scale representation. An eccentric inclination may involve unhappiness, inefficiency and sexual and social maladjustment. Lurid stories of sex transmutation are not helpful. I feel that publicizing the truth can be immensely helpful.