who) they are. They know it instinctively in a reproductive sense. Under the appropriate set of stimuli the males behave like males should and mount females and the females if similarly stimulated respond in the appropriate fashion and receive the male. Thus the species goes on generation after generation because each animal "knows" in an instinctive, programmed sense of the word which of the two kinds he or she is. And that is as it should be for lower animals that operate largely on instinct and do not possess the thinking capacities that humans have. But do we humans still have to be stuck with that lower evolutionary level of identity or can we rise to something more appropriately human? I think we can, I think we should, and eventually we will. Some of us already have and in all modesty I think my peculiar life experiences have brought me to that point. But now to examine the matter from a slightly differ- ent point of view for a moment.
Several days ago I had occasion to talk to someone who was an FP some years ago but who, in spite of all counsel and warnings from his friends, went through with the change of sex surgery. He then lived for a couple of years still as a man but without male organs, until his electrolysis smoothed his face too much and the hormones developed his breasts too much so that it became rather awkward for him to remain a man. He then changed to "she" and began some two years after surgery to live as a woman. In discus- sing this with him he told me, "I hated George, and by having sur- gery I killed him.” (The name is not the real one for security reasons). Here was a classical case of the Freudian idea of the personification of the self, the male self, in the penis. When the penis was gone the "George" self was dead. The fact that otherwise he looked the same, talked the same, had the same memories, talents, shortcomings, etc. as "George" did, made no difference, he wasn't "George" be- cause "George" had been "killed" by the surgeon. In essence then the "George" self was embodied in and arose from the penis.
A few days later I had an opportunity to talk to a female-to-male TS. This person had been a mother three times, though unwillingly since she had all her life wanted to be a boy and man and had gone thru the marriage and motherhood bit to try to conform to societies ideas of what a female was supposed to do. When I met “him” he was sporting a beard, mustache and sideburns and had a good crop of hair on the back of his hands and forearms. His voice too was quite adequately masculine. His significance to this article lay in the fact that he confessed that immediately after surgery to re- move the breasts (the only surgery he has had so far) was one of
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