and looking at its environment, that lowers tension and conflict, is perhaps best expressed in the "Personal Construct" theory of the late Dr. George A. Kelly of Ohio State University. According to this theory a person "construes" his environment and the people in it as having certain qualities. The acts of "Construct Formation" may be conscious or unconscious and the constructs true or false. Behaviour is then modified in accordance with the constructs so as to produce the least threat to the person from the environment. It is these re- sultant adaptations of behaviour that I refer to in this paper as the "reactive" aspects of a personality. Their emotional content will depend on the degree of threat implied in the original constructs. Thus I will learn, by watching objects fall to the ground, of the force of gravity. This knowledge becomes a simple construct by which I guide my behaviour when handling things. There is no emotion in- volved. Similarly I may construe my father as authoritative and punitive, but also construe Society as expecting me to emulate him in every possible way. These two constructs oppose each other and my resultant behaviour may be vacillatory, indecisive — and is bound to cause tension and anxiety for behaviour is not in accord with one or the other of the constructs, both of which are laden with emotions.

Before examining the evidence in favour of this theory, I would like to discuss the possible role of physiological or constitutional theories as causes of transvestism and transsexualism. There is little evidence that hormonal imbalance necessarily occurs in either state. It has been suggested that excess estrogen might be present, or that the cells in the Central Nervous System that mediate sexual behaviour are excessively sensitive to the normal estrogen content of the blood. Both should lead to a reduction in testicular activity through the Hypothalamus-Pituitary mechanism, with a resultant loss of Libido and weakened emotional drives. If one thing is true about both the transvestite and transsexual states it is that their emotional drives are exceptionally strong. Loss of Libido, if it occurs, is a secondary phenomenon, due to the intense anxiety set up by the failure to satisfy these emotions. Other similar mechanisms to the hormonal one belong to the realm of speculation. So little is known about the relationships between acts of thinking and neuro-physiological pro- cesses that we can scarcely begin forming testable hypotheses in this field.

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