this boy feel? If I could just let him know I understood how he felt. If I could make him believe I was sorry.

"How did you get that black eye?”

"It really doesn't matter how I got the black eye, does it? I told you, you would have pulled the trigger yourself."

The soft lilting voice was as feminine as ever.

"I would not have pulled it. I didn't hit you, did I?” I seemed on the defensive, as I am when I argue with my wife. Damn him, I thought, but I didn't say it. “Now you said before that you would give me a chance to solve your problems, and, as far as I'm concerned, nothing has changed since then."

"Alright, because it probably doesn't matter anyway, I'll tell my story. I'll waste your time, because it doesn't matter to me. Just now I have an eternity to waste.

"I don't know how to start telling you how I got to be like this. I can't really pinpoint the time in my life when it all started. Maybe it's hereditary. Ask my psychoanalyst. After three years on his couch he may know the answer to that. But he obviously doesn't know all the answers.

"Anyhow, for as far back as my memory will take me I have wanted to be a girl. I'm sure it wasn't just a sexual thing with me, as it is with the queers I've met. As far as I know my parents never encouraged me to be feminine. I just was. I'm sure it was not because my parents wanted a little girl. I remember the trouble I got into when my dad caught me dressed in my sister's skirt and blouse.

-

"It caused me trouble in school too. Not liking baseball just being different at first. As the other children grew older and more worldly; they started constantly teasing me about being a sissy. They had always known I was different, and they had hated me because of it. But now they had a word in their vocabulary for me. And they did not miss a chance to use it. God knows how I hated to wake up on school mornings.

"But by pressure at home and at school, by needing

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