.

"Looking at my instincts in my first childhood and my mental
confusion over myself, I do not believe the most sympathetic and
scientific treatment would have turned me into an average girl,
but I see no reason why proper physical conditions should not
have induced a better physical development and that in its turn
have led to tastes more approximate to those of the normal woman.
That I do not even now desire to be a normal woman is not to the
point.

"Instead of any such help, I suffered during the time that should
have been puberty from a profound mental and physical shock which
was extended over several years, and in addition I suffered from
the outrage of every fine and wholesome feeling I had. These
things by checking my physical development gave, I am perfectly
convinced, a traumatic impetus to my general abnormality, and
this was further kept up by demanding of me (at the dawn of my
real sexual activity, and when still practically a child) an
interest in men and marriage which I was no more capable of
feeling than any ordinary boy or girl of 15. If you had taken a
boy of 13 and given him all my conditions, bound him hand and
foot, when you became afraid of him petted him into docility, and
then placed him in the world and, while urging normal sexuality
upon him on the one hand, made him disgusted with it on the
other, what would have been the probable result?

"Looking back, I can only say I think, the results in my own case
were marvellously good, and that I was saved from worse by my own
innocence and by the physical backwardness which nature, probably
in mercy, bestowed upon me.

"I find it difficult to sum up the way in which I affect other
women and they me. I can only record my conviction that I do
affect a large number, whether abnormally or not I don't know,
but I attract them and it would be easy for some of them to
become very fond of me if I gave them a chance. They are also, I
am certain, more shy with me than they are with other women.

"I find it difficult also to sum up their effect on me. I only
know that some women attract me and some tempt me physically, and
have done ever since I was about 22 or 23. I know that
psychically I have always been more interested in women than in
men, but have not considered them the best companions or
co