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In the Daily Telegraph I read:

‘A Baltimore criminal court judge today authorised an operation to change the sex of George Lloyd, 17, who is awaiting sentence on a charge of stealing 15 women’s wigs, valued at £400. Two doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital described Lloyd as a psychic hermaphrodite and said the operation would be in his best interest. The youth said he wanted the operation performed. His lawyer said the request was made so that Lloyd could have a chance for rehabilitation before sentence was passed on the burglary charge.’

But that was in America. If I was found out, I would be sent to a Borstal to march about and play football, or to prison, where there were three men to a cell to prevent sodomy.

I wondered why he had wanted fifteen wigs. I felt happy for him. He was very fortunate. I wondered what he looked like. I hoped he was pretty.

No one who read the Daily Telegraph could be suspected of being a psychic hermaphrodite. I was holding it with hands that had nails that were painted with nail varnish. I thought that nail varnish made me move my hands in a feminine way.

Very often the sane walked about near the edge of madness, like Charlie Chaplins unaware of the abyss. They were sleepwalkers. I had crossed over the abyss. Now there were new dangers, but they were less terrible because they were external.

Through my senses I had pleasant contact with the world. The colours and textures and volumes and densities made sensations that were acceptable to me.

I was part of the world. I occupied space. I did not exist because I thought. I existed because I was a mass, a complexity of molecules. I had reached existence through a series of perversions stretching back in a universe that I had confidence was in a steady state of perversion. Only the void was not a perver­sion. I said, ‘Everyone should change sex at least once. It broadens the mind.’

I had not changed sex.