IRGIN

VIREWS by VIRGINIA

THE GIRL WITHIN AGAIN

Most of the philosophy about the subject of cross dressing which has been developed by myself and this magazine appeared in print a number of years ago. Those who have bought a lot of the back issues have found it there and been able to incorporate whatever parts of it they wished into their own thinking. However there are a lot of readers who have joined our ranks within the last 2 or 3 years who have just found bits and pieces of it here and there in the magazine without any explanation for the terms. For example, every now and again 1, or some author, will use the term "Femme Personator" or refer to the Girl Within as though everybody knew what was meant. It is rather unfair to them so I'd like to bring everybody up to date.

I was impelled to do this because of something I read. You will re- member that the editorial in No. 73 was taken from a book called Masculine/Feminine which is a book of essays about Womens Libera- tion. As I read through it I came upon a remarkable statement which put me on the track of restating some of our basic philosophy. I say "our" because a lot of the older readers understood and adopted it so it can be thought of in the plural. Well what I found was this statement: "The woman most desperately in need of liberation is the "woman" every man has locked up in the dungeons of his own psyche. THAT is the basic act of oppression that still waits to be undone, though the undoing might well produce the most cataclysmic reinterpretation of the sexual roles and of sexual "normalcy" in all human history." (The Hard and the Soft by Theodore Roszak on page 101 of Masculine/ Feminine.)

It is always nice when you find someone else saying what you have been saying for years, it makes you feel as though the world was finally

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