Transvestia

to visit again on another occasion. When one is travel- ing on a vacation it is not only to see and enjoy the sights of the place you visit, but you take a vacation in the first place to "get away from it all". Away from the worries, frustrations, problems, expectations, fears, and the general inadequacies of your ordinary life. On vacation people from the east go west and westerners go east; beach dwellers go to the moun- tains, and uplanders go to the ocean; those from hot climates go where it's cool and from cold ones to where it's warm. In short, everyone goes to a place that is quite different in some degree from the place he normally resides. This is not simply that they hate their lives the other 48 or 50 weeks a year, they don't, they enjoy their homes, their friends and often their jobs. They have their roots sunk in their homes and community and in most cases like it that way, but it's still nice to have a change they say, to get away from the humdrum and see how the other half lives. Its just variety relaxation and contrast.

Doesn't this analogy therefore, cover pretty well the "vacation" that we take when we seek change, re- laxation and contrast by leaving "masculand" for a- while and taking our ease in "femmeland"? Many a professional man would call this an "escape" but that is a rather harsh word with condemnatory overtones. Escape implies getting free from something perman nently or running away in the sense of making a get- away. No, the fact that we return like the vacationer removes the stigma of the "escape" charge. This is really the essence of the dual personality concept. In leaving our own everyday personality for a time we do learn to live as a stranger in a strange land gradu- ally until we are no longer strangers in that land. Not, perhaps, as at home in it as those who are natural born citizens of it, but surely as frequent visitors to

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