interviews with male movie actors on whether they'd play a love scene with you or not; pseudo-scientific series of articles on hermaphroditism by anonymous doctors about anonymous patients. All magazines are scrambling frantically to get a new slant on the sex change theme; salaciousness parades as science, obscenity becomes objectivity and you are stripped naked for the public gaze.

But this is the order of our day: only "puritanical eccentrics" refuse to be so exploited and the ordinary person has a peculiarly sharp fear of being called a poor sport. However you are not ordinary and, because of this, it is near incredible that you have handed over to world publicity your intimate life. You must have known how much misinformation would be attached to it, how much prejudice and lewdity. And couldn't you guess that solving your personal dilemma in headlines would infinitely increase the dilemma of hundreds of thousands of other people who are fighting another battle unrelated to yours but taken to be identical by society? If you thought of these things, you apparently rated them secondary, for few have done such a sweeping disservice to humanity with such blithe ease and excrutiating effectiveness as you have, Christine.

Unrelated to yours but taken to be identical by society. This is the crux of of the matter. As far as the public knows, you were merely another unhappy homosexual who decided to get drastic about it. Actually there has been no printed proof that you were either homosexual or hermaphroditic, but the cunning press has eluded libel by using the second term while meaning the first. As a result, the public is confirmed in its opinion that they are synonymous which they are not, that all human beings are either completely one sex or the other which they are not, that all men attracted to other men must be basically feminine, which they are not, and these men don't deserve and have no use for nature's "identifying" glands. This reasoning leads to legal limitations upon the homosexual, mandatory injections, psychiatric treatment-and worse.

Then you come along with your profound but common dilemma and bow to misinformation by submitting yourself to cleansing surgery. To the public, this is admission that you have the mind, "soul" or psyche of a woman and they applaud your admirable "solution"-which is actually no more than the substitution of one problem for another. It will be interesting to see how contented you are from now on-although chances are you will be because (1) you've made a decision you can't back out of and will have to adjust to or destroy yourself, (2) you've made a public decision which puts the omnipotent ego and its pride on your side; hell will freeze over before they admit an error, (3) you already feel the comfort of belonging to that society which was too big for you to fight because you thought yourself alone, and to which you have submitted with all its prejudices and ignorance that once made you so unhappy.

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