RANSVESTIA

none of them could compare to the totality of Mary Lee's loveliness. It was far more than physical. I avidly sought her company, and soon we were spending a lot of time together apart from the club as well as at the meetings. Since she had not known me during my first two years at Washburn, in her eyes, my new effeminate status did not cause me to suffer from the contrast. She accepted my femmiphilia from the start and even contributed toward it. But I never shared any of Mary Lee's pretty things, even though the invitation had been shyly proferred. I knew that a different part of my heart loved this girl. I would have willingly and abruptly ceased my cross-dressing forever if she had ask- ed me to. But she never asked that.

For the rest of my days in high school, the club made Washburn bearable, and Mary Lee made my whole life beautiful.

By graduation time, after living the role constantly for nearly two years, I had come to accept myself as a girl, and I had no doubt that I would go on to become a woman. After graduation, Mary Lee went east to her mother's alma mater. We wrote regularly for a time, but ap- parently we were too far apart from one another in miles, for our young hearts to keep us together, and our correspondence tapered off and then ceased.

Ten years after graduating from Washburn High School, Mary Lee died. She had been married once and divorced once, and that was the end of that. But she has been in my heart from the first instant I saw her at her first visit to the club, and of course, she will never leave me again. The club we started all those years ago, survives to this day, many teen-generations later, as a respected sorority at Washburn High School.

As for me, I am a woman now, emotionally, spiritually, and men- tally. I wear a medium in women's sizes, so, happily, I am easy to fit. I am perfectly contented with my lot, and have made a permanent peace with myself. I have taken for myself the femme name "Mary Lee." Each morning as I slip out of my nightie and into my nylon hosiery, my lacy panties, and the rest of my silken treasures, I tell God how grateful I am. This is the way I want to live.

But I can't help wondering what my life might have been if an un- sympathetic, unknown re-write man had not affected it so, with his graphic little newspaper story that awful October morning so long ago.

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