RANSVESTIA

it. "Dissonance Reduction.” This means that the degree of difference (dissonance) between what their lives actually turned out to be like (reality) and what they had planned and expected it to be (wishful think- ing) and fantasy has to be kept as small as possible for their own peace of mind. To accomplish this minimalization they will indulge in all kinds of rationalizations to themselves, and assurances to others that everything is just "marvelous" and "I'd do it again, twice over," and "it was worth all the cost, the pain, etc., etc." Thus they can still any small voice that tends to whisper in the back of their heads, "Hey, wait a minute, girl. Things are not really just like you expected them to be. You haven't gotten away from this problem or that one, and you have acquired new limitations on your actions that you didn't have before, and that Mr. Right' has not shown up to sweep you off your feet. You do have the continuous awareness of your “secret” and the continuous need to protect it," etc.

In short and to be very blunt about it operated persons simply cannot afford to come clean with the bare, unvarnished psychological truth. This is not to say that they are necessarily conscious liars. Some are, many aren't. But one can be an unconscious liar in the sense that various psychological mechanisms are at work to protect the individual from facing the consequences of his actions whether it was sex surgery or some- thing else. In any case I concluded that the literature reports about the successful adjustments, which were always rather high on the side of good adjustment, just couldn't be taken at face value as to the method of ac- quiring the information.

So I conceived the idea of having a questionnaire on the subject sent to the individuals by their doctors so that we would not know who it was that were getting them. They were also told that we didn't want any names or identification as this was not to be any sort of self-justifying ego trip. We just wanted the truth in the interests of science and didn't need to be persuaded about anything. I have said "we" because although I conceived the idea of the questionairre and invented the first list of questions the proeject was carried out with the participation of Dr. Peter Bentler of the UCLA Department of Psychology.

We got replies from forty-two operated male to female changes. We had asked some 200 questions and when the returns were all in we ran them through the computer. When the printouts were available we eager-

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