RANSVESTIA

readers who will otherwise rush to a dictionary so that they can cite it as an authority to prove Virginia wrong. (Yes, there are a lot of people out there who get some sort of kick out of taking sides against me or what I say-but I haven't time to bother with them, let them have their poor vicarious little victories.) But I rise to spike their guns beforehand on this issue, by pointing out that dictionaries are a formal compendium of the sum total of human ignorance at the time of their publication. Actually, of the state of things about ten years before their publication, since it takes about that long to revise one. I am aware that that sounds like a very superior attitude on my part but consider it for a moment. Mankind never finds out the whole truth about anything. What we do is to learn what we can, come to tentative conclusions and act on them as though they were true until newer information comes to us which requires us to modify the former con- clusions. At the time most large dictionaries were put together psy- chologists had not yet begun to recognize that gender, although biologically and sociologically based on sex, was in fact a separate entity. Thus, prior to that awareness, dictionaries treated them as part and parcel of the same thing. Nowadays, our slightly more enlightened understanding helps us recognize that the qualities which we designate as masculine or feminine are not necessarily connected to the anatomical sex of the individual. Thus we can have effeminate men and masculine women neither of whom hermaphroditic. So I hope nobody will get in a snit about what the dictionary says about the two words androgeny and gynandry. Because if we take the gender interpretation of the two roots, namely man and woman which in adjectival form mean masculine and feminine, we are using the words to refer to persons who manifest both types of qualities, characteristics or attitudes. O.K., so much for definitions.

are

Now the reason for making this condition the subject of the Virgin Views editorial in this issue, is that this duality is slowly coming into professional and public consciousness and it will do so a lot more in the near future. The drive in this direction is a by-product of the Women's Liberation movement because as women strive more and more to achieve equal opportunity, respectability and approbation for doing whatever they wish rather than what a chauvinistic society tells them they should do and be, they inevitably find themselves becoming androgenous. That is, they take on qualities and abilities previously thought of as being masculine. Thus we find books like Elizabeth Mann Borgese-The Ascent of Woman and Caroline

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