RANSVESTIA

ly scanned them looking for answers in which seventy-five or more per- cent of the responses were in the same direction. If trans-sexualism is really a medical entity like diabetes or typhoid fever or appendicitis you would naturally expect that forty-two patients "suffering” from the same “disease" would show a rather high degree of agreement on questions relating to the nature, symptoms, onset, development, etc. of their condi- tion. But we found no such thing. The only questions which had high correlations were those such as “would you do it again” and a multiple choice question in which one of the possible answers was "did you feel like a woman trapped in a man's body?" Naturally these two got 100% yes. But these answers were typical of that which led to the study in the first place, since as I explained in the beginning, they were under some pressure to justify their original decision. So these answers didn't prove anything since they were predictable.

Our conclusions at that point therefore, were simply that transexuality was NOT a medical entity. That, in fact, we were dealing with forty- two people who had done the same thing but that was essentially all that they really had in common since they didn't do it for the same reasons; didn't feel the same way about it; had not organized their subsequent lives in a consistent pattern (except that they now lived as women, of course), nor did they have the same feelings and interests now as women. While this observation came as no great surprise to me as it conformed to the opinions I have often expressed about the phenomenon, I was surprised to have it borne out so clearly by hard data.

This led Dr. Bentler and I to start speculating about it. Having noted that some thirteen of the respondents said that they had previously been married to females we idly wondered how they would answer some of the questions in comparison to the way some of the others did. This led us to the idea of dividing the 42 cases into groups which we did. In group one we put all those who had been married and who reported having had satisfactory heterosexual intercourse. Since we had asked the question as to whether they considered themselves to have been hetero-, homo- or bisexual before surgery we had a group (3) which had characterized themselves as being perviously homosexual and who had not been married. There were fifteen in this group. Finally, there was an in between group composed of those who could not unequivoc- ably be put in either of the other two groups. These were termed the

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