RANSVESTIA

Once upon a time, as all good fairy tales begin, there was a society in which all people suffered from a common genetic defect of extreme near sightedness so that everyone had to wear glasses. Even babies could not see very far into their world and could not apprehend a lot of what surrounded them. Thus they too were fitted with glasses at an early age. For some reason lost in social tradition, it became customary for all little boys to be given blue tinted glasses and all little girls got pink tinted lenses. With the glasses they could visually reach out and recognize and understand the world around them much better. Other than the glasses there was little visual difference between males and females, their clothing and hairdos being generally the same.

Remembering your high school physics you will recall that blue filters do not pass yellow light and red or pink filters do not pass green light, both pairs being complementary to each other. Thus the little males with their blue glasses saw the sun, buttercups, daffodils, pears and lemons for example, as blobs of various shades of grey. The females, on the other hand did not see the grass, shrubs and trees as being green. They too were grey. But this didn't bother the children any because they didn't know any better. They just accepted the world as they saw it and presumed that it looked the same to everyone else, particularly to other children. Without their glasses they could hardly see anything so each became acquainted with his or her world as the information arrived at their retinas.

However, as they grew older it became obvious to the little boys that the world must look different to girls than it did to them because girls became very fussy about the appearance of clothing and other articles which, to the boys, all seemed to be some sort of unimpressive grey and not worthy of much distinction. The girls, of course, regarded the boys as being insensitive since they didn't react to differences that seemed important to the girls.

One day one of the boys was home alone and walking past his older sisters bedroom, he noticed that her spare pair of pink glasses were on the dresser. Without any preconception of what he was doing but purely out of curiosity as to what it might be like to wear pink glasses he went into the room and quickly replaced his blue glasses with her pink ones. Instantly everything was transformed. He was amazed at the new appearance of the yellow pillow on the golden bedspread-they had both been nondescript grey before and he

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