Transvestia

transmitting some sort of supernatural or mystical awareness to my mind.

Alas, no. I can not even say with any degree of confidence that some unseen Fate, weaving some in- scrutable, recondite pattern of Life, took that moment to gather me into its design and cause me to buy the book (oh, I admit I like to think in these rather grand terms, but I resist the impulse to express them in print). I bought the book because it was about

a "sexual deviation" (Please! don't shoot' I'm striv- ing for objectivity and this was the way the blurb was oriented) of which I was unfamiliar.

Thus has the sisterhood of Transvestia been introduced to perhaps its most prosaic, mundane member, a dame who almost wasn't. Call it luck, fate, or what you. will, but if I had not seen that book I conceiveably might have gone the rest of my life searching for my true identity, inwardly dying a bit each day as time. passed and I failed to find release for my psyche.

I did buy the book, however, and thereby, as Shake- speare noted, hangs a tale. I returned home, propped the pillows behind my back, put my feet up on the ottoman and began reading.

It had taken 34 years to discover transvestism, but it took only minutes to realize that I was a trans- vestite! Sound incongruous? Perhaps, so let me expand on the statement a bit.

First of all, I do not mean that to this point in time I was a man in skirts walking around looking for a lable. I had never in my adult life worn an item of woman's apparel. But as I read of this TV's exper- iences I dredged up long buried memories of my own childhood. Like him, I had as a youth stolen into my mother's room and donned girdle, panties, bra, hose, slip and heels. Even now I am not certain at what exact age this occured, but triggered by what I read, I remembered that it had indeed happened, and my best

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