mildly androgynous, of whom Oscar Wilde is the best known of contemporaries; and (b) the ultra-androgynous, of whom the present writer is the most widely known of his generation.
(a) The anatomy of the mildly androgynous is not conspicuously feminine. Only a few feminine traits appear in the psyche. The mildly androgynous always mingle with full-fledged males and seek to pass as such themselves. As a cloak, they are prone to fabricate about excesses cum femina. But while secretly preferring homosexual romance, they are capable of espousing a woman and begetting children.
in every 500. These figures apply to such as are exclusively of the said nature [excluding the psychic hermaphrodites. Including the latter] the estimates must be greatly higher .... Some late statistical inquiries (See Statistische Untersuchungen, Dr. M. Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1904) yield 1.5 to 2 per cent as a probable ratio."
I myself have fixed upon the median of ratios I have read, as well as the frequency that has occurred to me as a result of a half-century's unusually intimate mingling with all social types in many nations, having possessed, at the time I lived in the foreign nations, some speaking ability in seven foreign languages. But the frequency is greater than I have given in the text rather than less. But the extreme German estimates are too high for the United States. It is my conclusion from intimate intercourse with the natives in many countries that the frequency of bisexuality per thousand is proportional to the density of population. Nature puts a break on over-population by increasing the proportion of sterile bisexuals. When a population is regularly underfed, the number of bisexuals born appears to increase. But that is not the only factor. Another law is that when a consanguineous multifamily (a group of families) multiplies with exceptional rapidity, bisexuals are born in that family even though the food supply is undiminished. The author believes the latter to be the reason he himself was born bisexual. It was because the generic womb (i. e., those of my grandmothers for several generations) had been overtaxed.
The ratio is probably much higher among the cultured—particularly art devotees—than among the "hoi polloi."
