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way effect a change, this condition requires expression just as legitimately and just as forcefully as any other integral portion of the personality pattern. Phychic stress, leading to very real personality sickness and breakup, seems to be the characteristic pattern of any prolonged attempt to repress a real transvestite pattern.

That first young couple, incidentally, made a very satis- defactory adjustment to this problem and even found in it En something shared which drew them closer together and an extra pattern for occasional use in loveplay. Since then, in some twenty-odd years of counselling, I have encountered transvestism a number of times. I do not feel it is as prevalent as homosexuality, though one man's practice alone is insufficient basis for rendering more than a guess. Transvestism does not necessarily interfere with a "normal" and productive life, marriage, home and career, if only it be recognized as a basic part of the individual so constituted and given honest acceptance and the required expression.

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But where does this force come from? In the transvestites I have known, in my talking with colleagues and in reading the literature on this subject - in short, in all I can ascertain, it seems that neither heredity nor environment are the source of the transvestite component within a per- sonality. True, some transvestites have as children been dressed in the clothing of a sibling or the parent of the opposite sex. But that seems to me to be but the early manifestations of this state of being, and to attempt to call such early cross-dressing experiences causative to the condition, seems to me to be most inadequate. Almost every child at some time or another takes on the clothing or the role of the other sex, in one way or another. With most, it is only one of the many transient experiences of life, but with a few, it makes a contact with something that appears to be truly a part of their real being.

It seems to be that the professional literature on the