RANSVESTIA

An individual may be very dissatisfied with his or her sex or his or her gender and be very anxious to change one or the other or both, but he is seldom confused about it. He or she knows that they are a man or a woman but they also know what the opposite gender is. To want to leave where you are and go someplace else implies a fairly clear concept of both. A truly genderally confused person would not know which gender he or she belonged to and would not be able to act and live in any consistant pattern, nor would they want to change because being that confused they wouldn't know what they could change into.

The word "confusion" in the areas we are interested in should more properly be applied not to the individual but to the outsiders, includ- ing the therapists, he comes in contact with. They live in tidy little male = man and female = woman stereotypic worlds and they can't conceive of anyone wanting to be other than what they are (sexually), and have been trained to be (genderally). They are the ones who are confused about the whole area of sexual vs. genderal identity-two very different concepts but which are frequently thought of and spoken of as though they were one and the same.

The individuals most generally considered to be gender confused are those males who enjoy wearing feminine attire. The original term for this behaviour was "transvestism," and it was coined specifically to describe heterosexual males. Today it is used indiscriminately for anyone who cross dresses regardless of his reasons for doing so. Because of this now vague and non-informative term I have coined the name "femmiphillia" for the condition, and "femmiphile" for the individual. It literally means "lover of the feminine" and precisely describes the motivation of the heterosexual cross dresser as distinct from the homosexual "drag queen," who generally has no great per- sonal regard for the feminine but who uses the outer appearance of a woman for its sexual attraction for other males. Linguistic purists among you may complain that the world is illegitimate because it is composed of both a Latin and a Greek root. This is because neither the two Latin roots nor the two Greek roots which would translate to the same meaning are vocally "comfortable" or euphonious. I will use an abbrevation of this term, namely "FP" to describe such persons in the balance of the paper.

For the last 20 years I have published a magazine for this type of person. It is called Transvestia and is designed specifically for what I

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