flatten me out a bit. The first moments felt sort of strange as I tried to think what a man carries in his pockets- oh yes, I've got to have a wallet, and a pocket comb, my keys, some money, etc. I searched around and accumulated these, put on a sport jacket and took off. I had combed my hair straight and let it dry but it was too fluffy. I put some lotion on it, tied the back part into a short pony tail and tried to plaster the sides down without too much success. Well, the important part of the story was that as soon as I was entirely "put together" as Charles, I WAS Charles. I walked, talked, gestured and felt perfectly Charlesy as it were. I went to the GG's house, surprised the heck out of her for a few minutes then settled down to a turkey dinner and a nice long dis- cussion after it in which I comfortably sprawled out as a man will and felt completely myself AS Charles.
So what? you may say, what's so unusual about all of this, I do it every week! True and so did I for years. But bringing the boy self back after two years is something different (or so I thought it would be) than bringing him back after 5 or 6 hours. The purpose of relating these three events to you is that to me they prove the validity of the "Girl Within" concept by way of proving the "Boy Within". It will therefore be easier to explain and to grasp if we consider the nature of this "boy within" - Charles.
Anyone's personality is made up of a summation and an integration of experiences encountered, knowledge learned, patterns of behavior es- tablished, attitudes acquired, conditioned reflexes developed, and self concepts constructed. All these working together at a given time serve to present the total person that the observer sees and reacts to. Now all of these are psychically interrelated in memory. It isn't that some little physical chunk of brain tissue gets set aside and contains "Charles" (or anyone else) but rather that all of these interrelated psychic functions operate together to present a consistent and identifiable external person- ality and also an inner sense of completeness and conformity.
Charles "lived" in this body for 55 years before relinquishing it to me on a permanent basis in 1968. "Charles" consisted of memory traces of his various experiences (and his feelings and interpretations of them), of the various kinds of knowledge acquired during these years, of his manner of handling his body, conditioned patterns of behavior which are constantly repeated, his attitudes about people, things, and himself, his specific abilities and specific needs, and his emotional relationships to all these things. It is unreasonable to suppose that because one changes gender that he will literally forget all knowledge and experiences acquired
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