VIRGIN VIEWS by IRGINIA

WOMAN BY CHOICE OR WOMAN BY DEFAULT?

This decision is not one that will have to be made by any large number of you but it will be my subject for this essay both in the hope that it will have some impact on those few (hopefully) of you who cherish an idea of sex change surgery and because such a discussion may also help the rest of you to a better understanding of the whole field of self identity - both sexual and genderal.

Now the best place to start any discussion of anything is at the beginning so let's go there. In man's earliest period as a thinking animal his only point of reference about himself or herself, since I'm talking about individuals, was the biological one --- his anatomy and reproductive function. In short, he had to regard himself as an animal in which the only differences in life activities between males and fe- males comes when the reproductive process is activated. As any animal knows instinctively that it is a male or a female and that it will play one or the other role in reproduction, so too did thinking man observe the anatomical differences, recognize himself or herself as a male or a female which is to say a potential father or mother respectively and construct a self identity on that basis. A sexual self identity means that you acknowledge your anatomical-physio- logical structure, realize that you are a potential inseminator or a potential "baby maker." If you were the latter, one of the other biological imperatives was that you nurtured the young after birth and for this purpose females are provided with breasts. If babies are to be nurtured first literally at the breast and subsequently in other non-nutritional ways such as caring, training, protecting, etc., it must have had to be done in and around the home base, whatever that happened to be.

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