years of my life I only look back on a round of misery.  The nervous strain was enormous and so was the moral strain.  Instead of a child I felt myself, whenever I desired to please anyone else, a performing monkey.  My pleasures were stolen or I was snubbed for taking them.  I was not taught and was called a fool.  My hand was against everybody’s.  How it was that with my high spirits and vivid imagination I did not grow up a moral imbecile full of perverted instincts I do not know.  I describe myself as a docile child, but I was full of temptations to be otherwise.  There were times when I was silent before people, but if I had had a knife in my hand I could have stuck it into them.  If it had been desired to make me a thoroughly perverted being I can imagine no better way than the attempt to mould me by force into a particular pattern of girl.

“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