ransvestia

ience while earning my advanced degrees, maritally through two marriages, parentally with one child, and economically, executively and competitively through founding and being president of my own manufacturing corporation for 15 years. Although there are numerous specific experiences that individual men have had that I have not, these areas cover the main aspects of a man's life. I'd operated in all of them and satisfactorily, so when my second marriage went down the tubes (not because of my being an FP) and I had sold the business, I had the free choice of what to do with the rest of my life.

I felt at that point that I had a pretty good working knowledge of that half of the totality of humanness known as masculinity and my forays into the world of femininity begun so long ago at the age of 12 and which in the early and mid-sixties had widened out as the results of radio and TV appearances to a month or six-week excursions as Virginia, had given me glimpses into the other half termed femininity. However, these were always vacations from manhood you might say because I was aware that I always had to come back to that as a base line. So when I no longer had business nor domestic pressures to restrict me to the masculine world I decided to swing over to the feminine. So for 10 years now I've lived as Virginia.

During that time I have not just visited womanhood, I have become part of it-sharing largely (but not entirely) in its advantages and having to put up with most (but not all) of its disadvantages. Since I am not a female (though I am a woman), I cannot share the wife- mother aspects of femininity. By the same token I do not have to put up with menstruation and the oftentimes unfulfilling role of being a female to an aroused male. But on a genderal level (woman), not sexual (female), I think I have learned pretty well what life is all about. Enough at least to realize that I would not have been ahead in the total game of life if I had been born a female and raised as a girl.

If that had been the case I would just have been a girl, accepting my female and feminine life as just the way life was. Boys who become FPs can dream and fantasize about the wonders of being a girl but a girl who is naturally a girl doesn't do that. In fact she may very well feel very constrained with the biological and social limita- tions that are put on her and rebel against them. Surely she doesn't rhapsodize about the marvels of being a girl. And if the fantasizing FP had in fact been a girl-she would not have had the motivation to rhapsodize about it because for better or worse she would be stuck with it.

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