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1908 Abduction

By Edward Prime Stevenson (Xavier Mayne)

Preface: This report may not appear as it seems. It is highly possible they were a lesbian couple, and the "shocked" wife may just have been covering up the situation. We will never know the whole story.

"A pertinent case occurred lately in the city of St. Louis, in the United States of North America. Through the statement of a local physician, a type-setter in the town was taken into custody, when employed in the office of a local journal, on a charge of abduction and as being a woman, though known as "Johann Burger". The facts soon were clear. Anna Mattersteig was her real name. She was thirty years old. She was living matrimonially with another young woman, Martha Gammater, the daughter of a Leipzig jeweller, and had so lived before they came from Germany. Then, but apparently not earlier, Martha Gammater had discovered that she was the partner of a woman, not of a veritable man. The shock had made the wife insane. At the time of the arrest, she was in an asylum. Anna Mattersteig appeared in court in full male attire, and looked like a fine-appearing man. She disclaimed any intention of contravening the law, in respect of her impersonation and of the abduction (for such it had been) of her companion. She declared that she had assumed the role simply because she "felt herself wholly like a man" and was sure that only by a mistake of Nature had she come into the world at all otherwise. She "would suffer any penalty" rather than wear women's apparel."

Source: Edward I. Prime Stevenson (Xavier Mayne, pseud.}, The lntersexes; A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life, 1908.

Copyright Steven Louis Brawley, 2007-Present. All Rights Reserved.