their drives they do so in various ways but with the added guilt of keeping these activities secret. All of these factors are at the very least very destructive to peace of mind, effectiveness and happiness. With those less able to bear up under the burden, various kinds of psychosomatic complaints often develop including migraine, cardiac conditions and gastrointestinal disturbances or ulcers. Unfortunately the extreme price is also often paid, with the suicide of a person who just feels he cannot live with the fear, shame, guilt, isolation and with the denial of the opportunity to express what is an essential part of his own true self. Such suicides can more properly be termed social murders since the causative agent is society's attitude.

What then is the prognosis in this condition? Several authorities have indicated the great unlikelihood of "curing" transvestites. That is, of removing from their minds the awareness of the pleasure and satis- faction they have obtained from their cross-gender activities. None of the authorities ventures to guess why this "incurability" exists because they do not know the basis for the satisfaction in the activity. As long as pro- fessional people cling to complicated Freudian concepts about "phallic women", castration complexes and the like, and when they consider this behaviour as a fetishistic or entirely erotic perversion they will never find the answer. The answer is, however, clearly evident if it is looked at as a psycho-social problem and not a psycho-sexual one. Basically the pattern is not a sexual one at all. True, it has erotic aspects, but so does every form of interaction physical, mental and philosophical between persons of opposite anatomy.

The essential nature of the matter of prognosis is completely revealed in the etiology of the condition in the first place. A polarized society denies the privilege of exploiting and experiencing part of their true selves to all individuals. The need to express this part of themselves and to exploit it even against society's denial of the right, is the cause of the deep emotional conflicts in such persons. There is no way of carving out parts of one's "self". Psycho-surgery of this sort lies well in the future. Therefore, in view of the inability of the femmiphile to deny and forget this part of himself, the only alternative is to learn to live with it. That is, the best management of the condition lies in the individual coming to recognize that it is not the act of dressing in feminine attire in itself which is hurtful, but rather his attitude toward it (distilled though his own mind from society's expectations and demands). When this is accomplished he can learn to set aside and disregard these attitudes and accept the fact that he is what he is, enjoys what he enjoys and that he derives his own deep satisfactions from the act of dressing and will con-

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