RANSVESTIA

I, on the other hand, do not yearn to be a pseudo female with that hole. It isn't good for anything except to be filled by a penis except insofar as it provides the source of one's self identity. I would much rather, and do as a matter of fact, base my identity not on being one or the other of the two halves of total humanness but rather on having arranged my life so that I can have access to and a choice of both halves. And two halves make a whole not a hole.

In due course I came to realize that this wholeness could not have come about had I been actually born a girl because then I would only be an expressor of the opposite half of my potential. But a half is only a half regardless of which half it is and thus I would not have been able to achieve wholeness that way either. Now the burden of this essay is to try to get any of you who still think "I wish I'd been born a girl" to give it up and to realize that you have far more potential by virtue of knowing a lot about one half and a little about the other. That little may become a lot as the years roll by, even as it did for me. But even if you never go full time into the opposite gender role, you are better off as a male raised as a boy who found his girl within and therefore access to the rest of himself than either a natural born girl/ woman or a non-FP male/man.

A second purpose is to try to influence any of you who are toying with the surgical trip to a reappraisal of the situation. Going from the frying pan to the fire is merely trading one set of psychological- physiological-sociological-economic problems for another set of the same thing. Because while a man's world and a woman's world can be toted up on a scoreboard and on any givn item one or the other will have an advantage or a specific disadvantage, when the total score is taken into consideration, things are about equal. If you think about it philosophically, it couldn't be any other way. On a physical basis if you were to split a human being right down the middle through the nose and the belly button you would end up with two half human pieces characterized by the fact that wherever there was a special part such as the left arm on one there was a specific lack in that same location on the other-and conversely for the right arm. The only reason why one life style seems to have net advantage over the other is for the same reason that the chicken crossed the road and the cow looked over the fence with longing at the lush grass on the other side-namely because one tends to match up the disadvantages of where one is with the advantages of where one is not. Seldom do we do it in reverse to match the advantages we already have with the

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