RANSVESTIA

and condemn surgery in principle as some claim I do, but to try to get people to see 1) that the only possible and logical use for a vagina is to receive a penis, 2) that unless you are penis-oriented (yearn for sex with a penis - male) before surgery you are not likely to become so after surgery since that attitude is in your head not in your anatomy, 3) that if you are so oriented beforehand you ought to learn to be happy as a homosexual and enjoy sex with males AS YOU ARE and forget surgery, 4) that if you have no urge to receive a penis sexually there is no point in having the surgery to begin with and moreover this urge will not auto- matically develop just because you cut the penis off and sew a vagina in, and finally 5) that being a "woman" is merely a way of living your life and since few if any other persons other than your doctor will even know what's between your legs — they judge you by how you look, act, and pre- sent yourself that you yourself ought to consider yourself in the same way. If you look, act, feel and can project an acceptable aura of femin- inity and want to live that way then just do so. My book on HOW TO BE A WOMAN THOUGH MALE should be a very useful guide to this transformation. But don't think that merely having a hole in front makes a lady out of you. No way!!

I've talked with a number of people who wised up just in time to avoid the surgery and others who didn't find out till it was all over that 95% of what they accomplished with surgery could have been just as well done without it and they would be three or four thousand dollars ahead not to speak of all that pain. One, who is a pretty perceptive and ana- lytical type, told me that now she has had surgery she is rather over- whelmed by a feeling of "what do I do now”? In some esoteric way she had expected all kinds of marvels to be bestowed on her by virtue of the surgery but she just found that she was only another woman in society. Everybody treated her as such and she had to work and put up with the limitations of womanhood just like the rest. She wasn't turned on to males as she thought she was going to be when she was in the pre-op fan- tasy stage; nobody asked her to pull up her skirt and "prove" her right to wear dresses, and so the feeling of "What Now?". It was sort of anti- climactic for her and pathetic to me.

It is terribly tragic that these simple points of view just don't get through the heads of those contemplating surgery. Their ears get plugged up, they only hear what they want to hear. They have preconceptions that are impregnable they don't want to know anything that might dissuade them and they plunge on toward the operating table like cattle in a stampede. The fact that some of them several years after the sur-

-

72