RANSVESTIA

that shots would be the thing as once it was in you, you didn't have to have another shot for sometime. So I made an appointment to see an endocrinologist here in Los Angeles who has taken care of a good many TSs and who is a good friend of Dr. Harry Benjamin.

I went to see him, told him my story and got the usual instructions: "Take off your clothes, to the waist." I did so and he felt the breasts very carefully. He found no lumps but did find some rather firm areas that he said were probably fibrous tissue but that he wouldn't want to do anything with hormones until he knew more about what was inside. So he referred me to a doctor for "Xeromammography." This is a special kind of X-ray onto a special kind of electrostatic paper and was developed by the Xerox Corporation. Unlike regular X-rays coming out as a negative film, this comes out as a positive print just about like the output of a Xerox copying machine except that it is on soft blue paper. It has the special characteristic, however, of showing up all the veins and arteries and other soft tissue in great detail. Soft tissue does not show on a regular X-ray except as a sort of haze and certainly doesn't show any detail.

Well, anyway I made the appointment and had the unusual ex- perience (for a male at least) of having my breasts X-rayed. It was an interesting process. They put the breast on a sort of little shelf that is at- tached to the chair you sit in and which pivots around against your chest. You put the tit on the table as it were and the long, special X-ray tube comes in overhead. It has a long, conical shield in the end of which is a large balloon blown up and about half into the cone and half sticking out. This pressed down on the beast softly and also forces your chin, arm and other tissue out of the way so that the rays get the breast only. The very nice black lady that ran the thing asked me a number of questions which I answered entirely truthfully. For example, she asked me if I had ever had a baby and of course I told her no. She also asked if my period had stopped naturally or by way of surgery and I told her no, they had stopped naturally. (I didn't bother to tell her that they had never started naturally either.) Anyway, all went well and the $60 worth of mammograms came out fine.

The reason I'm telling you all this is because of what I learned when I went back to the doctor's office for consultation. We discussed what was to be gained by taking the hormones and went over the several reasons that I had in mind, one of which was that I have a scalp condition that the dermatologist told me was sometimes helped by es- trogen administration. The doctor then informed me that while the

87