enables me to tame them, at times
remarkably. I not only loved all other creatures, but I believed
that men and women were the most beautiful things in the universe
and I would rather look at them (unclothed) than on any other
thing, as my greatest pleasure. I was prepared to like them
because they were beautiful. When the time came for me to leave
school I rather dreaded it, chiefly because I dreaded my life at
home. I had a great longing at this time to run away and try my
fortune anywhere; possibly if I had been stronger I might have
done so. But I was in very poor health through the physical
crushing I had had, and in very poor spirits through this and my
mental repression. I still knew myself a prisoner and I was
bitterly disappointed and ashamed at having no education. I
afterward had myself taught arithmetic and other things.

"The next period of my life which covered about six years was not
less important to my development, and was a time of extreme
misery to me. It found me, on leaving school, almost a child.
This time between 18 and 24 should, I think, count as my proper
period of puberty, which probably in most children occupies the
end years of their school-life.

"It was at this time that I began to make a good many friends of
my own and to become aware of psychical and sexual attractions. I
had never come across any theories on the subject, but I decided
that I must belong to a third sex of some kind. I used to wonder
if I was like the neuter bees! I knew physical and psychical sex
feeling and yet I seemed to know it quite otherwise from other
men and women. I asked myself if I could endure living a woman's
life, bearing children and doing my duty by them. I asked myself
what hiatus there could be between my bodily structure and my
feelings, and also what was the meaning of the strong physical
feelings which had me in their grip without choice of my own.
[Experience of physical sex sensations first began about 16 in
sleep; masturbation was accidentally discovered at the age of 19,
abandoned at 28, and then at 34 deliberately resumed as a method
of purely physical relief.] These three things simply would not
be reconciled and I said to myself that I must find a way of
living in which there was as little sex of any kind as possible.
There was something that I