This is rather like point 4 but deprived of gender. Society comes to expect from each of us the continu- ation of the personality which we have build for our- selves and by which others come to know us. But there are times when each of us would like to stop being ourselves and manifesting the personality we have grown to be. Who has not had this feeling at one time or another? Yet under ordinary circumst- ances we cannot leave ourselves behind by any usual means. The transvestite is able to do this, however, and more completely than would be possible in any other way.

Thus the relaxation and peace of which so many of them speak in trying to explain the satis- faction of transvestism are achieved by taking com plete leave of their ordinary aggressive, competitive life and their everyday self and personality.

So much then for the causes and the satisfactions of transvestism. What is to be done about it? The psy- chiatric fraternity, being a branch of medicine, includes many who are imbued with the idea that anything out of the ordinary should be " cured," that is, brought back to a condition of conformity with society's customs. Thus they seek, by various means, to make the trans- vestite forget his enjoyment of dressing in feminine attire and expressing his feminine side. They have, however, been eminently unsuccessful in doing this. True, there are cases reported here and there in the literature, but many of these were not true cases of transvestism in the first place, being persons in which the transvestic activities were incidental to or part of a larger and more complex behaviour pattern. Recently there have been several reports of sucess with aversion therapy, utilizing either the nauseating effects of apomorphine or the discomfort of electric shock applied while the patient was attired in feminine clothing, in order to condition him against his dressing. It is, to my mind, a sad commentary on the scientific integrity. and medical wisdom of the physicians or psychiatrists doing this, that they were apparently more interested in forcing the individual to conform than in finding out what really motivated him. I think it would be generally agreed that such negative conditioning might remove the sympton of cross-dressing, but would do little to destroy the desires underlying it or the satisfactions attained by it. Thus all that is done by such treatment

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