Transvestia

for greater convenience in their gender role, not because they sought experience as a female with a male. So the three conditions, homosexual, tran- sexual and transvestite all have separate motivations and just because all three may have the same behavior symptom does not make them the same thing any more than three men with a high fever all have the same disease.

This leads directly into the question of sex vs gender. Most people assume that because a certain gender commonly goes with a specific sex that the gender role is an innate result of the sex of the individual and just as biologically determined and as immutable as is the sexual anatomy. Such is not the case. Many studies, particularly those on per- sons whose true sex was wrongly determined at birth and who therefore were brought up in the wrong gen- der role, have shown that gender is a learned and culturally determined pattern of behaviour. Thus masculinity and femininity in a particular culture are set forth by that culture and young males and females are therefore brought up to "fit" these pre- determined patterns of behaviour. These patterns are all encompassing: What we wear, how we act to- ward the same and the opposite sex, how we antici- pate we will be treated by others of the same and opposite sex, what emotions we are entitled to ex- press openly, to some degree what sorts of occupa- tions we can enter (though this is blurring greatly in recent years), and how we are expected to react to situations and generally handle ourselves are all part of our culturally determined expectations and we all learn them both consciously and unconsciously as we grow up.

But implicit in the idea that we learn a socially defined role is the fact that were we not assigned to the "right" (meaning appropriate) role in the be- ginning that we would be just as able to learn and live out the other role. Thus it has been found in

the studies referred to that actual females improperly

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