RANSVESTIA

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product of their bodily alteration. They are somehow unable to see themselves as both sexual and genderal creatures and that having these two sides to their total humanness they have the possibility of altering one without necessarily altering the other. Instead they see genderal identity (womanliness) as a by-product an undeniable and inevitable by-product of their sexual identity (non-maleness). To put it in very blunt terms - people with a hole in front can be women so if they get their male organs removed and an orifice constructed then they are by definition, women. Their womanhood becomes a matter of definition rather that of choice. They are woman by default rather than by choice.

I tried to show in the first part of this essay that gender identity, the sense of being a woman or a man is an outgrowth of social roles and expectations and was built on the sexual differences between males and females but is not in reality dependent upon those differences. This is certainly more true today than anytime in history. Women are greatly expanding the definition of what is included under the term "woman" by showing that she is capable of most of the things that men are capable of and if an individual woman wants to do something heretofore considered masculine she just ups and does it. She doesn't go and have some sort of surgery to make her a "non- female" so she can equate this with masculinity so that she can wear what she wants, have the kind of job she wants or make the kind of social contribution she wants. If females can do it without surgery why can't males? Ah, you say but what about the female to male transsexuals, isn't that exactly what they're doing? To a degree that is correct but while female to male seems to be just the reverse of male to female it is not that easy. True, to remove the sexual part of one sex and create a semblance of the sexual parts of the other is an opposite situation, but the psycho-social component of the decision is not by any means equal and opposite. Women are the peasants of our society while men are the nobles. For one born a peasant to aspire to the status of a noble is certainly more of an understandable ambition that for a noble to aspire to become a peasant. As a result the female to male persons always come across as much better integrated and "together" people than the male to female type.

It is apparently very difficult for those FPs who are in the process of deciding the class two or class three question, to deal with the concept of a self designation supported by the appropriate under- lying external anatomy. This is rather surprisingly a very male chau-

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