8.

SOME EXPERIENCES IN MY "WOMAN PROJECT" by "Jeannette"

((Ed. Note: This is a true story with a few de- tails obscured to avoid identification of the author, who has achieved some public prominance in his field. However, I have known "Jeannette" personally for a number of years.))

Two of the persons who had come with me to the air- port to see me off knew that I was a man in woman's clothes. The man there, a scholar and also a lecturer, had been quite interested in my experiment ever since being told of it six months before. The larger of the two women with me, a movie and television actress and stage performer had been one of my confidants and friends in my "woman-project" for longer than that. The third person with me, the smaller woman knew me only as Jeann- ette". She and I had become fast friends in the little church I started attending when I first assumed my woman identity a year and a half before. She had then sponsored me into her chapter of the Eastern Star, where we were now Star-Points and sisters together.

Not that I had begun my girlhood, so to speak, only eighteen months before this trip. The first time I re- member putting on my sister's dress was when I was 9 years old and that was thirty two years ago. My other brother had donned a dress too on that first occasion, for we children were "dressing up" that evening. Somehow I knew even then that wearing a dress struck a deeper response in me than in him--that here was something which, though new and unexpected, was a profound and basic part of me. So on occasions thereafter, all through the school years when I was home, I spent hours or even whole afternoons or evenings in my room studying, in some dress and per- haps underthings of my sister. These I carefully too for the occasion and as carefully returned them to their place. when the time was over so my use of them was not detected.