RANSVESTIA

Heilbronn's Toward a Recognition of Androgeny and a new one by June Singer, Androgeny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (see Book Review in this issue of TVia). Because it is the women primarily who are moving out of their past social prisons into the light of new accomplishments, it is women who do the writing and it is about women that they write.

So who writes about the movement of men? Who do you think, little old Virginia, and I've been doing it since well before any of the above books were written. But speaking for a group generally regarded by society as being somewhere between perversion and insanity and having to publish my observations in this magazine and in the several books I've written for our particular sub-culture is not the way to become widely known and accepted. But if that is my limitation it is your good fortune. Now that will come over as a really conceited statement to some of you and if that is the way you see it, so be it, it will be your problem. I've grown enough to be able to say things about myself that I think are valid and true whether they are compli- mentary or not without having to preface it with a half-hearted apology. The reason I say it is your good fortune is that I hope I can provide many of you with some insight about yourselves and stimulate you to a greater awareness of, and appreciation for the potentials that your cross dressing has opened up for you.

I'm writing about androgeny-gynandry because I am getting very involved and interested in it. Maybe I can stimulate some of that interest in you. From one point of view, it is rather ironic that we have to have words and conceptions like these because as babies we are all androgenous. It is the process of growing up that divides us into two possible kinds of people. Then as adults we begin to realize that we are missing something and we start searching for it. If we find it we are termed androgenous or gynandrous. What a waste. How much better the world would be if we just kept what we had at birth, but we are, fortunately moving in that direction, thanks largely to the women's movement. The agitation against war toys, de-emphasizing the masculine "virtue?" of violence; the willingness to let little boys play with dolls, the admission of boys to cooking classes and girls to shop and auto repair classes in high school, women as breadwinners and men as house husbands are all straws in the wind.

But what all or most of you have experienced since you first started dressing in girls clothes is another route to the same thing. Of course

88