55.

to him. Persons not wishing surgery and not wishing to be"cured" would not be included in his comment.. This is another example of muddled medical terminol- ogy, thinking, and conclusions regarding true TVism.))) Similarly Benjamin thinks that transvestites and trans- sexualists in the U.S.A. "...are hardly enough to consti- tute a problem...even if restrictive laws were relaxed with the help of medical certificates." Another group of writers is of the opinion that transvestism is not at all as rare as it may appear. For instance, Wilson says. that "transvestism is quite a common perversion" ((Damn his terminology--Ed)), and Ellis states that in his exper- ience transvestism comes next to homosexuality in frequency. Within the last three years we have personally treated 4 male transvestites in Bristol, a city with half million population. Thus our figure is over 6 times higher than Hamburger's. Yet both figures have no meaning and no value. Nobody knows, how many transvestites, apart from our 4 patients live in Bristol alone. The same lack of infor- mation applies everywhere.

The paucity of the literature on transvestism may be easily explained. The great majority of transvestites usually succeed in achieving a fair social adjustment, and are never discovered or even suspected. A further reason for the scarcity of reports on transvestism is "the extreme reluctance of transvestites...to undergo any treatment that ...would remove the perversion and deprive them of their perverse gratifications" (Weideman).

(((Ed Note: No we are finally "cooking on the front burner". The sad part is that although admitting the above, all that has gone before has been based on what is obviously a poor sample of the field. This is the kind of thing that has caused so much heartache because the average practitioner, M. D. or Psychiatrist draws his information from published reports of cases. So when the literature is made up of relatively few cases and these are "mixed up kids" or unrepresentative spec- ial types your doctor and mine have very little to go on and are therefore of little help to TVs generally.)))