RANSVESTIA

people because anatomy is still present on the slab in the morgue or on the dissecting table in a medical school. Living people behave, in one way or another. Since sex behaviour is next in significance after sexual anatomy, we have a continuum dealing with sex object choice. It originates in the head rather than in the gentials and is therefore a psychological continuum. The choice runs from one extreme of selecting sexual partners ONLY from among members of the opposite sex, to selecting them ONLY from members of one's own sex. The midpoint on this scale is the bisexual. Such a person has now transcended the object choice barrier and has established his or her emotional comfort in being able to have an orgasmic experience with either type of partner.

To many these two continua or dimensions would seem to adequate- ly characterize anyone. But they don't because humans live in a third dimension, that of society. This cultural continuum runs between the very masculine and the very feminine lifestyle-whatever those may entail in differing cultures. Naturally there is a midpoint here too and it is termed "androgenous." I would like to emphasize that these three midpoint words, hermaphrodite, bisexual and androgyne, are very frequently confused and not properly understood. It is necessary to get it clear in one's mind that human beings operate on all three basic dimensions, the physical, psychological, and social or cultural and they cannot be adequately described using only any two of those three. If you take these three dimensions and use them as axes of a cube you would be able to assign some point inside that cube to every person alive assuming a method could be found to quantify the sexual and social dimensions as Kinsey did with his famous 0-6 scale for object choice.

Some consideration should now be given to how we all come to be trapped inside the two little permissible enclaves at each end of the gender continuum. When we are newborn males and females we have, as a birthright, ALL the potentials that separate a human from a chimpanzee. I am NOT referring to various genetically controlled differences, nor to pathological differences nor even some of the subtle and newly discovered differences between male and female babies neurologically. I AM talking about the psycho-social potentials. Certainly we would all agree that both a male and a female baby could grow up to be either dependent or independent, courageous or cowardly, tender or cruel, passive or assertive, etc. But the fact is, that except for conspicuous exceptions, they don't.

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