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obvious oversell. When will it occur to the members of the profession that such reasoning is based on nothing but plain residual male chauvinism? To feel such inordinate pride in one's maleness as the psychiatrists consider "normal", is not possible unless a person at the same time feels that, to be a woman, is something very much inferior, or at least something lower and something less. This follows by the mere definition of such an attitude.

Male psychiatrists suffer from a strange affliction, they are all men. And they observe and study from an unfortunate angle, they only meet the sick. It will not happen in our lifetime that we will read a competent work on sex and gender, one without malephobia, until one is written by a woman psychiatrist. Surely, by this time, there must be a competent woman not completely under the thumb of the men established in the psychiatric profession?

Enough of conjecture. At the time I sailed through the age of puberty and teen development, the modem speculations had not been made, and all this business of pride in the male "identity" passed me by nearly unnoticed. There is only one way I can recall I ever reflected over my "identity": I know very well now, and I always have known that I am not a female, and will never become one. As a teenager, I never once reflected over the fact that I was a male. It was obvious that I was, but trivial. It never seemed to mean anything to me. It was the fact that I was not a girl that seemed meaningful. I used to wonder about that. I never exactly worried or fretted over it, nor did I even really wish it to be otherwise. It is just that this was something about me that seemed important.

I was not a female. I knew that, and I knew very well this would never change. I never had fantasies about growing up to become one. This too seems to contradict the psychiatrists. I have read in several books that little TV boys are supposed to send up prayers to God to let them grow up to become girls. This I never did, and never thought of doing.

I did, however, in my childhood, even before I started to dress, have a conviction of sorts, perhaps an obsession, that for years never seemed to make sense, and I do not know where it came from. It had started in a purely childish romantic sense, before I had developed an awareness of sex, and when of course I had not the faintest idea there were things females could do together in the way of sex.

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