“mother wanted a girl" syndrome, through simple curiosity as a child, taking a girl's part in a play or in a mock wedding, being dressed as a girl for Halloween or a masquerade party, to a relatively more conscious decision to "dress up just to see what it is like”. But however the individual comes to be exposed the first time to the experience of wearing feminine clothing, the effect is essentially the same all of a sudden he becomes aware of having been freed of the limitations and requirements of being a boy or a man and feels himself able to receive, perceive and react to environmental conditions and events in a new and different way. He has, in effect, re-established contact with that part of himself which existed when he was small but which had been suppressed, denied, punished and left relatively undeveloped during the process of learning to be a boy and being masculine. Such recovery of a part of oneself that had in effect been lost (or stolen by society) is deeply satisfying and the individual is not about to give it up at the behest of society, a psychia- trist, his parents or anyone else. This accounts for the literature failing to report any effective and permanent "cures" for the condition. In fact many authors, such as Bowman and Engle, Eyers, and Walker and Fletcher have expressed the improbability of psychiatry being able to do so.

The symptomatology of the condition is, of course, very simple and obvious. Individuals much more commonly males are discovered, who enjoy wearing the clothing, jewelry, makeup, hair styles, etc. nor- mally appropriate to girls and women. These persons act like, wish to go about as, and be accepted as members of the feminine gender.

One cannot diagnose an indifidual as being a femmiphile on the basis of his cross dressing alone since various other types of persons also show this pattern, i.e. homosexuals, fetishists, bondage and humiliation enthusiasts, criminals, etc. However, if the cross dressing is taken in conjunction with the fact that an individual is not effeminate in his masculine life, that he is sexually attracted to females and is generally married and a father, and that he carries on an adequate and effective social role as a man, he can probably properly be termed a femmiphile. Such persons are in no way obvious to the observer. There are no indicia of this pattern. Any man that one sees could as well be a femmiphile as another.

A clear distinction must be made here between simulating and enjoy- ing the experiences of the opposite gender role and of enjoying the opposite sexual role. The homosexual male person who provides an

87