as a sort of magic way of outwitting fate and destiny—“see, I'm not that person anymore and all those hangups and monkeys were his, don't lay them on me. I'm new and different and free.” I've watched more than one TV, with various neurotic traits in his personality, seek to "escape" into a new personality. He finds when he emerges into it that lo and behold he still has the same brain, the same store of experience and memories both good and bad AND the same set of neurotic prob- lems he always had, because they were a by-product of the experiences and memories that that brain had been through. We may have developed sex change surgery but we have not yet developed psycho surgery and the scalpel which cuts into one's genitals does not cut into his head. So the new "woman" finds that not only has she not escaped the neurosis of her past but the frustration and disappointment at not having done so becomes itself the basis for a new neurosis. It is almost exactly like going on a drunk because life has gotten too much for you. Eventually -a day, or a week or a month later you come out of it with exactly the same problems you had before but with the new problems of a hangover, of lost time and money and perhaps job and wife. You're worse off than before.
Alteration of sex and gender is no more effective than a big binge in solving problems like these unless and specifically except when the problems are themselves the result of sex and gender conflict. And those in whom this is true are the real transexuals in the first place by the definition given in the beginning.
Let us summarize this discussion concisely then in these ten points: 1) Sex and gender are not the same thing;
2) sex does not “cause” gender as an automatic biological develop- ment, rather it provides simply the anatomical and reproductive identity that leads society to assign the gender;
3) having been assigned the gender one learns it by direct teaching, indirect observation of appropriate behavior, by intuitive con- formity and approval and basically and unconsciously accept- ing the assignment given and "going along with it."
4) that TVs for various reasons early become aware of an unwill- ingness to go all the way into the acceptance of masculinity at least to the extent of refusing to give up all of those qualities and feelings socially assigned to the feminine gender;
5) that the TV pattern is a matter of gender identity and not sexual identity (homosexuality);
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