RANSVESTIA

such people, sex changing surgery can often be quite a blessing because now they are not expected to perform either as males sexually (in the active pursuing role) nor as men genderally (in the sturdy, accomplishing, providing, in all ways capable, role). Thus, since less is expected of women than men, their lowered performance leaves a much smaller gap between expectation and performance (in fact possibly none at all) and thus there is lessened anxiety or none at all, the person is happier and society has a more productive member.

But this is about the only kind of "problem" that surgery solves. Unfortunately there are too many who have led rather complicated and unsatisfactory lives in one way or another and who feel that somehow in becoming a woman and a "female" they will escape from all that and life will begin again. It is a terrible and unsettling experience for them to come to after the surgery and find themselves in bed, as it were, with the same human being they have always been in bed with themselves. The problems they had before are still there and while some of them may be more easily solved in the new role, others are just as difficult as they were before but now complicated by the fact that whatever solutions might be tried they have to be tried out by a new type of person-a woman who is not too sure of how to be a woman, let alone how to solve pressing problems that way. The result is in many cases a profound post-operative depres- sion. The person realizes that she still has the same problems she always had but that socially speaking she is a non-person. She has no work record, a new name, probably a new kind of job, if she gets one at all, she has no past to talk about and has to be very careful in conversation not to refer to things and places that "he" did or went. She also hasn't had the long years of girlhood and intentional and incidental training for womanhood that girls go through so she is always walking a tight rope trying not to reveal by conversational errors of omission or commission that things are not (or were not) as they seem. The new construction between the legs may be a help in reestablishing a sexual identity, but it is of no help in the much bigger problem of establishing a new sense of oneself, a new self identity if you will. I have watched some of the ordeals that operated TSs go through and they run all the way from suicide, through promiscuous prostitution to "prove" their womanhood, i.e. their "femaleness" through serious and long-lasting depression, up to a sort of resigned acceptance of the fact that they are now different but that life isn't much changed and they still have to get along as best they

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