RANSVESTIA

Captain De Conniers was a tall figure of a woman with shoulder length blonde hair. She was not dressed in a regulation uniform, but was wearing a blue evening dress.

"The planet Scyros IV," she began, "is a member of the United Femmiphile Federation. In fact it is the headquarters planet of our federation. We have watched the development and progress of your civilization for many centuries. We knew that one day our two cultures were destined to meet. Before we could let this happen we felt is necessary to prepare you, as your culture for the most part does not condone your lifestyle. It was necessary to have the officers of our Genderprise exchange places with you three for a few hours. You have been taken back in time to the origin planet of your own federation, Earth. You have just experienced the same reaction that members of our federation experienced upon their first contact with your world centuries ago in the mid 1970's. The transvestite culture of your world failed to thrive for the very reasons you three discovered today. There are still those among your kind who hold to the need to express their feminine side, but they are widely scattered and secreted. A machismo fad was also in formative phases at the time you just visited. It won out and greatly affected your culture. Your men became afraid to express their feminine qualities in themselves and went as far as to act against their own common sense in order to keep from every appearing influenced by the softer, more gentle feminine qualities. These actions were largely responsible for your World Wars III and IV. A few isolated cultures among your federation missed experiencing the same catastrophies by finding ways of avoiding the machismo infatuation of your Earth. The Vulcan are a prime example. They could not choose between machismo and a feminine approach so they did away with both and adopted a system of logic without emotion. There was no need for a femmiphile culture among the Vulcans as there was a universal concept of male and female. The differentiation between masculine and feminine was eliminated by replacing emotion with logic."

"This is quite true, Captain," Spock injected. "It was only after lengthy exposure to your culture that Vulcan men and women again began adopting different dress and appearance styles. Largely due to the problems your representatives felt trying to distinguish between us. It was only logical for the sake of improved communication between our two planets for us to readopt gender appearance roles in order to relieve your representatives' frustrations."

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