RANSVESTIA
It is quite common to read medical articles and find someone referring to a "continuum" which presumably runs from male to female and is supposed to include everybody somewhere along the line. This is a very superficial and erroneous way of looking at human beings. We operate not on one continuum but on three, those of sexual anatomy, sexual choice, and gender role. We live in three-dimensional space so it is not surprising that we operate in three dimensions, too, since there are three axes. They can be plotted geometrically as a cube. When this is done we begin to see how we can account for the many different styles of human activity. I have made such a cubic graph and a little study of it can be very instructive.
The eight corners of this cube are idealized positions since no one is a pure case of anything, but we can characterize them according to the following table. Please note that the right hand side of the cube represents female positions and the left side the male positions.
Sexual Gender
Position Sex
Choice
Role
Psychosocial Type
male
male
masculine
"butch" homosexual male
2
male
female
masculine
normal heterosexual male
3
female female
masculine
4
female male
masculine
LO
5
male male
feminine
6
male female feminine
"butch" homosexual fe- male (lesbian)
hypothetical female trans- vestite (non exists)
full-time drag queen (male homosexual cross-dresser) full-time "male woman" (such as Virginia)
7
female female feminine
female male
feminine
"femme” female homo- sexual (femme lesbian) normal heterosexual fe- male
But as indicated previously, few individuals occupy the perfect classical positions at the corners so it interesting to point out the significance of the various lines. To begin with, the horizontal "X" axis can be termed the "structural variable" since it delineates the anatomical variables. The "Y" or vertical axis is the sexual choice or
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