RANSVESTIA

his articles, "The woman most in need of liberation is the woman locked in the dungeons of every man's mind." We FP's know that and we have done something about liberating her.

We are, strangely enough, the very vanguard of men's liberation because we directly face up to and deal with that which is most men's greatest fear and insecurity his own femininity. We should take pride in that and not skulk hidden and unknown because most other people don't know and understand. We should do something about making them understand. But we can't do this as individuals anymore than any other group can educate society on an individual basis. That is one of the reasons that The Society for the Second Self was formed. First, we must educate our own people away from con- cepts of homosexuality or mental illness as "causes" of cross dressing; second, we must all learn that expressing our femininity is only "liberating" something that is in all of us and always has been, and thirdly, we must take what steps we can toward telling the world and demonstrating to it when this is feasible that male individuals do have a feminine side, that it is inherent in all of them, that it is not an illness or an hallucination and that expressing it along with our daily masculinity serves to make us more whole people.

Now a little bit more about Tri Sigma. This is an organization for heterosexual cross dressers, femmiphiles (FP's) if you will. I refuse, as many of the older readers know, to use the term "TV" as it used to be used. As a matter of fact, I was the inventor of that abbreviation way back about 1957 and as publisher of the oldest publication for our kind which you are now reading I popularized it. But when it began to be adopted by drag queens, bondage, punishment, rubber and leather fetishists and others I abandoned it and invented the term "femmiphile" or lover of the feminine to describe our particular interests. There are a number of other organizations across the coun- try which are what I call "open-ended" which is to say if you express an interest and pay your dues you are in, more or less regardless of your particular persuasions outside of cross dressing. Now I want to make it clear that it takes all kinds to make a world and everybody else's hobbies, peculiarities or persuasions seem ridiculous, immoral or illegal to everyone else. So it isn't up to me or to you to put down somebody of different persuasion. Let them do their own thing. But because you realize that someone else has a right to their life ways the same as we do doesn't mean that we are not entitled to be