Sexual conduct is not primarily a voluntary matter or an ethical question, but rooted in anatomy, physiology, and psychology. The androgyne who yearns to preach the Gospel can do so through the printed word. Because of St. Paul's sex teaching (that of an anaphrodite) the profession of "the cloth" is rightly open only to anaphrodites and the mildly virile. The more virile are likewise excluded because it is next to impossible for them to abstain from adultery.
Why are androgynes so hated? Primarily because the leaders of thought have always identified them with the men of ancient Sodom (mistakenly, because the Sodomites were full-fledged males) and historians have mistakenly (because they never met androgynes personally and were taught in their boyhood to hate them with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength) laid upon them all the blame for the decline and fall of nations, and declared that therefore effeminacy or androgynism is a type of moral depravity to be crushed mercilessly. Better that some thousands of androgynes be deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than that the general welfare of the nation be imperilled! Androgynes—they argue—are unavoidably the scape-goats of the race.
I answer: In the first place, such imperilment is only a figment of the imagination. This superstition can be disposed of by merely asking to what extent the welfare of humanity was imperiled by the sex functioning of the arch-androgynes listed in chapter III? In the second place, androgynism is not moral depravity or degeneracy. I myself—an extreme type of androgyne—spring from the most puritan stock. I was brought up to consider that on Sunday, reading
