VIRGIN

&

VIRGINIA

RESEARCH

RESULTS VINDICATE MY POINT OF VIEW

Many of you who have read TVia for some time have read at various times articles or editorials of mine on the subject of transexual surgery. Most of you know by now that I am not in favor of the surgery except in very special cases which make up only about one out of a hundred of those who go to clinics seeking the operation. Time was when I was a voice crying in the wilderness and I was considered to be either very square and very old-fashioned or some sort of a traitor arguing aginst what many FP consider the logical end result of FP development. How- ever in more recent years a number of the more leading authorities around the country are beginning to voice considerable doubts as to the wisdom of the surgery. Papers were read at the Honolulu convention of the Amer- ican Psychiatric Association about suicides of four operated TSs who ap- parently were getting on well to all outside appearances. Little by little the true nature of this pseudo panacea is beginnning to emerge.

Unfortunately there are still too many people in the professional field who see a good sized pot of money awaiting them if they begin to do the surgery and thus set up a so-called “Gender Identity Clinic". Others, particularly surgeons, who while outwardly indicating that they are just compassionate persons wanting to help the poor, misunderstood "pris- oner in a man's body," inwardly get a good deal of psychic satisfaction from "playing God." After all -- how much closer can you come to being a creator of life than in creating an apparently new form from that life. The individual doesn't die and get recreated, but one personality is shucked off and destroyed (so both the surgeon and the TS think) and a new one created. This is a big ego trip for a surgeon. There are, of course, others whose motives are more humanitarian and who, although they do not perform the actual surgery, are involved with the problems in

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