you are satisfied to be taller, heavier, more rugged and a rather normal picture of a man. The point I'm getting to here is that your dreams, fantasies and mental pictures of your femmeselves are 99% general in nature. In short, they are essentially the same as they were when you were small before the anatomical and physiological differences be- tween males and females were of much consequence to you. You should realize then, that all along you have been dealing with gender and not with sex. You prayed to be changed into a GIRL not into a female. You would not have been satisfied with the deal if you had had that anatom- ical change made while you slept to be discovered when you awoke, and then to put on your pants and shirt and boys dirty tennis shoes and go out and play baseball with the gang. Of course not, that would have been ridiculous because you didn't want sex change, you sought a gender change.

You see therefore from your own past memories that you longed for girlishness not femaleness. As you got older, however, you began to reason that girls got to be girls and feminine because they were females and gradually as you got more adult you began to think in these terms i.e. that the only way to be a girl or be a woman was to acquire a vagina and POW! you'd be one. In other words, it is really a semantic problem in that we tend to use the word girl as a synonym for female which it is not. Now it is true that most females are girls. They are human beings who have the two qualities of a female sex and a feminine gender at the same time but because they usually go together does not make them the same nor does the one require the other. This works both ways. As I pointed out above I, Virginia am a woman but not a female and there are a good number of others like me. On the other hand there are per- sons who are female and yet who dress and live like men—not like males because they are not. A real butch lesbian or “diesel dike”, as they are sometimes called, falls into this category. She proves the other side of the story in that she is a female but is a man- of the masculine gender— as determined by the usual criterion of dress, hair, mannerisms and general way of life.

Well, all of this may seem way off the subject of transexualism and sex change surgery but it is not. I have put it this way because it is my hope that these articles on the TS thing will so clarify it that some of you who read them and who are now wishfully thinking and/or planning on how you can accomplish the surgery will get a new slant on the matter and "cool it". What I have tried to establish so far is, a) Sex and gender are different things, b) the TV who envies and emulates his mother, sister or other like creatures is envying and emulating their gender and its privileges and not their sex-their femaleness, c) that if

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