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WHAT IS BACK OF TRANSVESTISM?

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Dr. J.J., Los Angeles, California.

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Transvestism first came to my attention as a counsellor when a fine young couple, married some four or five months, came to me for help concerning this question. The husband, manly in appearance and certainly satisfying to his wife, both in bed and out among friends, had finally told her of an occasional urge to wear dresses which, if repressed too long, led to great inner distress. She, brought up with our current cultural concepts and misunderstandings of manliness and womanliness, objected emotionally to her husband donning any feminine attire and felt that somehow their relationship was doomed.

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Both were intelligent individuals, willing to learn, and it was a matter of only a few months before their marriage, so close to the rocks, was more firmly established than ever. I was able to help the wife to see that this was not homosexuality on the part of her husband, nor an ab- normality on her part to allow him to take a feminine cast at times. Nor was it in any way a reflection upon her ade- quacy as a woman or her attractiveness to him; neither was he attempting to usurp her role in the marriage. His own history clearly showed him to be a transvestite, not a homosexual, and not a transexualist.

The force of the transvestite drive in him interested me. It showed the characteristic pattern of any basic portion of a personality, in that if it were repressed too long, it developed a deep phychic stress within the personality. Since then I have become quite convinced that the trans- vestite urge is typically an inseparable part of the psy- chological make of individuals so constituted. Unless deep hypnosis might perhaps reach that area and in some