Transvestia

women. We lived in a special section and were treated with more kindness than the others. This was because the priests, who were our instructors, felt that our dif- ference from other boys was due to a spiritual power which set us apart and above other people. When one of us would show signs of intelligence or wit the priests would nod their heads and say to one another, "They have contact with the world of the spirits of knowledge, or "They are favored by the Goddess 'Mideo" who dressed her only son as a girl so that her husband the cruel 'Cayon' would not make him go to war. The only sadness I knew in the temple was a longing for my mother.

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At the age of twenty I was given the Rite of the Physician and began to practice. Because I chose to live as a woman I had to give up many of the legal rights of normal men. I was forbidden to bear arms or to marry a physically perfect woman. We men-who-lived-as- women were allowed to marry only cripples, impotent women, or slaves.

I chose for my first wife a comely girl of sixteen who had one leg shorter than the other. She bore me two sons and six daughters. The boys I gave to an uncle of mine who was impotent. Our daughters we raised and they were our joy. As we got older though I get ahead of myself I took several slave girls as secondary wives. They were young, beautiful, and physically perfect but they never had my real affection.

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Strange as it may seem my good fortune in life was also the beginning of the end for my people. Shortly after I became a physician and had married, the Tent people, who lived to the far east of our cities, came in- to contact with a strange group of related tribes that were migrating towards us. A war broke out and, for a time, we seemed to be doing well. For the first two years our armies never lost a major engagement; they managed to capture a fair amount of horses and dome- stic animals as well as some treasure, and of course women slaves.

My practice became great. I had several young doctors working for me in a hospital I had built on the outside of the city wall. I displayed signs of good in-

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