RANSVESTIA

When the concept of self-acceptance was first laid out for me by Dr. Karl Bowman, I realized that it was, a) the only solution to my problems but, b) that one could only accept oneself if one shouldered the respon- sibility for being that kind of self in the first place. If you are made to be or do something by someone else you are not in a position to accept the situation because it wasn't your doing in the first place. You can achieve self-acceptance however when you come to realize that you ARE some- thing or you DO something because YOU decided to do it yourself. There may have been all kinds of guilt, shame, fear and whatever involv- ed but when you really looked at it honestly YOU did it because YOU wanted to. Now do you begin to see? I early decided that much as I might try to quit being an FP and, guilt ridden as I was, ashamed as I was, fearful of discovery as I was, and as desirous as one part of me was to swear off and never dress again when I did dress again nobody was responsible for doing so but ME! And when I faced that ugly fact the battle to achieve acceptance began to turn in my favor.

Having learned that, I was motivated to TELL it and I began to do so in the first issues of TVia. I didn't know if I could locate enough other FPs like myself to keep TVia going, so in the first three issues there were stories of domination such as "Life with Aunt Cora.” But in No. 4 I printed a questionaire about both the material which had appeared in the first 4 issues and asked it to be graded on degree of approval and asked a question about future material. The heading titled, "TV stories without involving bondage, humilation, punishment and force got 90% compared to headings covering these types of themes which only rated 40%. I was pleased and relieved.

Now why should it make that much difference? As an editor I should presumably be willing to print anything people wanted to read, right? But I am not just an editor. If you will allow me the liberty, I like to think that I am also a teacher or a helper in the battle to understand and accept. Having learned how myself I wanted to pass it on. Well, in thinking about all this it soon became clear to me that stories about humiliation and dominations and beliefs in astrology and reincarnation were not helpful to FPs trying to learn to accept themselves. Now I also realize that saying that may lose me some readers who fervently believe in As- trology or Reincarnation but that can't be helped. Hopefully my words may be helpful to some of the rest of you and are therefore justified.

You might ask how come I class these two philosophical persuasions along with stories of humiliation and punishment and the answer is clear and simple. Both the stories and the philosophies stand in the way of

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