RANSVESTIA

culinity, asserts herself and demands attention and opportunity to exist to live.

Of course the psychiatrists seen by FPs over the years, having no concept of the "girl within" but being very Freudianly alert to any- thing having to do with sex, latch on to the reports of masturbation which accompanied the dressing. This gets fixed in their heads, reported in their journal articles and is eventually enshrined in psychiatric dictionaries which are then quoted ad infinitum by therapists who write books but probably have never laid eyes on an FP. So it is always defined as, "Transvestism-wearing the clothing of the opposite sex for erotic purposes." This leads also to its being referred to as fetishistic cross dressing. Of course there is vastly more to it than that, but you can't tell a psychiatrist because few of them originate concepts but all of them have faith in and quote the "experts."

As the FP gets older he gets married, becomes a father, has a job and a reputation to maintain, etc. So his dressing is limited to special times when it can be done secretly and safely. If he is lucky enough to have an understanding wife it may be more frequent. Incidentally, many such understanding wives find a relationship with their partner which is much richer and fulfilling because of her recognition that many of the things she likes about Joe are there because "Jane" is there too, albeit out of sight. Such a couple can have greater com- monality because he has become liberated and she already is to a considerable degree or she would not be capable of acceptance. Two liberated people live in a mutually fulfilling companionship rather than in a mutual dependency, which is what ordinary marriages are, in which the missing (meaning suppressed) parts of one are more or less filled in by the manifest parts of the other so that between the two of them they have at least one complete human being in the house.

The second class is a group of which I am a member and about which most of you haven't heard, namely that of the transgenderists. These are people who have adopted the exterior manifestations of the opposite sex on a full-time basis but without any surgical intervention. Thus they are what may rightly be termed "male women." To digest this term you will have to really understand the idfference between sex and gender, i.e. between female and woman. Such persons have transcended the gender barrier completely. In the months immediate-

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