ARTICLE

Dirgin [Jirginia

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HERE AND THERE WITH VIRGINIA

I'm always at a loss in reporting on one of these trips because I know that there are mixed reactions to them. Some write and tell me that the reports are fascinating, others feel that they take up too much space for more appropriately FP literature. So as a kind of compromise, since this year's trip was long in fact and long in reporting, I'm only going to print half of it in this issue and continue it to conclusion in No. 72 thus not taking too much space out of each issue. I hope this will prove satisfactory.

So now to the story. I have tried to avoid unnecessary detail and have made it more of an itinerary style report. There is so much more that could be written that it is hard to keep it terse and if I have failed in places I hope you will forgive me.

It might interest some of you to know that while in 69 and 70 I traveled on a passport that said Charles Prince, AKA Virginia Bruce, I did not feel comfortable going behind the Iron Curtain that way lest some enterprising commissar might want to know what the two names meant. Therefore, in June of this year I had my name changed to Virginia by court order. Thus I was able to submit this to the Passport Office and get a new passport in that name with my picture on it. One's sex is NOT mentioned on a passport it only appears in the birth certificate that has to be submitted to get the passport in the first place. So there were absolutely no complications on the trip.

This trip had its genesis when, late in 1970 I learned that the 2nd Gender Identity Symposium would be held in Copenhagen in Sept. of 1971. I had gone to the first one in London in 1969 and decided that I'd like to take in this one, too. I had no plans to retrace my 1969 journey so soon but the Symposium provided a justification. Of course

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