depression and guilt because of the feeling "I've murdered my children's mother." This was very interesting to me since at first blush one (especially a genetic male) would tend to think of her motheringness as being personified in the uterus- where the baby came from. But on more thoughtful consideration the point was more logical. The uterus is, after all, only a baby basket, the mother has little to do with the processes that go on there, she just carries the child around like a foreign body (which it really is) for nine months and then gets rid of it. But the baby, once being alive and in this world, needs to be loved, fed and nurtured, and the mammary glands of the female are par excellance the mothering center for both the female and the baby. Without breasts this individual could no longer "mother," that is feed and physically nurture her children, and as she had herself brought about their removal she was guilty of "murdering" this "mother" person. She too had fixated this as- pect of her self image in a sex organ.

Well, these two examples only serve to point up quite dramati- cally what we all do without knowing it. We start our concept of ourselves from our respective sex equipment and its functions which is essentially just what animals do on an instinctive level. But what about this, do we have to stay at this level? Can't we just be people and build our self concept on some other foundation? Yes I think we can and moreover I think FPs are making the first step in that direc- tion when they select a femme name and acknowledge the exist- ence of a "girl within" regardless of how well or how poorly de- veloped she may be. In short when we can really, on a gut level, begin to build our concept of ourselves, our identities on an "I am a human being, I am a person" level rather than I am a male-man or female-woman level we will have begun to move up the scale away from our animal predecessors.

Now this is not easy to do, very possibly you may never attain it but it is not only possible it is desireable and it is where it is going to be for everyone sometime in the future. This doesn't mean that everyone will not still be aware of the type of genitals they possess and their proper function both in procreation and in recreation. It does mean that they will find that sex while, useful, pleasurable, and natural is not the main thing in human life. It is in animal life be- cause the only discernable purpose in any animals life is to make another animal and having done so he or she has fulfilled that pur- pose and might as well die and clear the stage. In some species, such as the bee, that is exactly what the male does; in some fish that is what happens to both parents. But gradually humans are finding

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