Numa Praetorius remarks, it would seem justly, that while the
invert must properly be warned against unnatural sexual license,
and while those who are capable of continence do well to preserve
it, to deny all right to sexual activity to the invert merely
causes those inverts who are incapable of self-control to throw
recklessly aside all restraints (_Zeitschrift fuer sexuelle
Zwischenstufen_, vol. viii, 1906, p. 726). The invert has the
right to sexual indulgence, it may be, but he has also the duty
to accept the full responsibility for his own actions, and the
necessity to recognize the present attitude of the society he
lives in. He cannot be advised to set himself in violent
opposition to that society.
The world will not be a tolerable place for pronounced inverts
until they are better understood, and that will involve a radical
change in general and even medical opinion. An inverted
physician, of high character and successful in his profession,
writes to me on this point: "The first, and easiest, thing to do,
it seems to me, is to convince the medical profession that we
unfortunate people are not only as sane, but as moral, as our
normal brothers; and that we are even more alive to the supreme
necessity of self-control (necessary from every point of view)
than they.
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