gradually brought her around to agreement. Today I doubt she would bother with surgery even if it were free.

So this about concludes "This Is Your Life, Virginia." I have summarized, I hope not too lengthily, the major events of these last ten years. The details of various trips and specific experiences have been incorporated in previous Virgin Views columns to which I refer the new readers. But the purpose of presenting all this is so that you who are new can learn for the first time that everything has not been a bed of roses for me personally during these years while I have been engaged in trying to be of what service and help I could be to you out there. There were a lot of times when I'd like to have thrown in the sponge but I couldn't forget how it was for me before I found myself or found another TV friend. I don't wish that on anybody so I stick with the task. TVia and its ancillary activities of publishing, counselling, lecturing, appearing, corresponding, interviewing etc. take up large portions of my waking hours and a good many when I should be sleeping. What you pay for TVia is not by any means al- located against just the cost of printing and mailing a 96 page publi- cation. Since I can't eat if I don't earn and since I could not do all the things I'm called on to do in TV-land if I had a job, some of this income simply goes toward the expenses of being counsellor, inter- viewer, PR girl, secretary, lecturer, and general educator in the field of TVism. I hope those few who have screamed at the price increase from $4 to $5 will come to understand this. I am not just a publisher.

So where do we go from here? That is a big question. On a per- sonal level it is not difficult to answer. Charles Prince has become the "boy within" quite literally I'll do an editorial on that in the near future. Virginia is now as real a person as any other woman. I've learned that my identity no longer originates as it does for most people in their sense of maleness or femaleness that is in their geni- tals. Mine now originates in my head. I know at last and finally who and what I am, I OWN myself. I don't in effect lease myself from society on condition that I conform to societies requirements. I'm not a rebel exactly, I'm just asserting my right to be ME first and a member of society second. I expect to go on in this vein until they throw sand in my face, or light the pilot in the crematory — "Fire it up, Joe, here comes another one a real weirdo." I won't care then and better still I don't care now. I know who I am. If someone out "there" doesn't know, then his uncertainty is his problem. I don't have a problem anymore. Peace!

19