TRANSVESTIA

I'm not pushy I can get gently into the conversation. One problem is that most of the customers are on the old side. Still that is a good thing for a man to learn; that is to relate to women that are no longer handsome. Perhaps the beautician would have a harder time to make one of them pretty than to prettify me. A nice thought anyway. As men get older they seem less virile. It is the opposite with women. They seem to get more masculine. A great rationalization for an aging TV.

Since I lost thirty pounds I don't have to pretend to myself I was looking for a more rounded feminine figure. In fact the fat male develops in all the wrong places. With a slimmer waist my chest is more noticeable. Slim men have more curves. Shoes will always be a problem. My feet are just too long. I think I need at least an eleven, but my dress size has gone down considerably. In Church I always say, "Rome wasn't built in a day." I guess you could say the same about Cleopatra and more about Danny La Rue. Many of us want to take short cuts. That's foolish. Getting there is half the fun. But seriously becoming femme is not a matter of clothing alone. Attitude has a lot to do with it, and that's true too in modern catechesis. Many in the Catholic Church complain that they don't teach the ten Commandments any more. It's unimportant if the attitude is right.

Beyond identifying with women in the way they dress, I believe I admired a certain quality in women not to be found in men. It's a lack of stiffness, a naturalness, a grace that comes through even when women wear blue jeans, provided of course the women are not slobs to begin with. Some men in recent times seem to have something like it, but these men are in show business usually; they are often singers and there is a little hint of exaggeration that takes from the general naturalness. We men who need to preserve a masculine self while wanting at times to be feminine can never quite satisfy ourselves that we make the grade as women, but then many women feel far from adequate as women.

Fantasy has to play a large part in our lives. We dress as well as we can and let our minds to the rest. Yet we live in a cruel world and we don't like to be laughed at and that is why we need the kind of tolerance that we cannot expect from the general population but would like from those we love. This is not to say that some TV's don't make the grade as women. Virginia has. She has given her whole life to it. Her insistence that we don't allow ourselves to get tagged as

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