RANSVESTIA

fashioned two story house with four bedrooms upstairs. So, since a good many came as men and had to change, I put one or two in each room and then scurried from room to room, zipping up dresses, fastening bras, combing wigs, advising on makeup and generally encouraging the participants. Many of them were extremely shy about going downstairs to face their sisters and I had to explain that this wasn't a Miss America contest and nobody had to be beautiful, only be herself. So one by one I walked the reluctant ones down the stairs and finally we were all assembled and in a few minutes everybody calmed down and became involved in conversation like they'd known the others for years. It was such a tremendous burden off of everyone's chest. Thus went the first meeting, in America I am sure and probably in the world, of a formal organization for transvestites or male women.

We then had meetings once a month after that and soon on alter- nate two weeks we set up discussion meetings wherein we examined various aspects of the behavior insofar as it involved not only the TV herself but also the wives and children. Everyone learned a lot, and the discussion groups were very popular. During this time Barbara was editing the Femme Mirror and handling mail order aspects of Chevalier Publications.

Somewhere about this time the idea of Phi Pi Epsilon or F.P.E. came into being. I had by this time consolidated my philosophy to the point where I understood that the process of growing up and becoming a boy or girl was in reality partly a process of unfolding and developing like a rose which starts as a bud with the potential to become a beauti- ful flower and then very gradually does so. But simultaneously it is also a process of contraction and compression and finally of suppression which amounts to burial of other potentials considered inappropriate to the sex of the individual concerned. Thus, since I recognized that all of the potentials are our birthright, there was reason and justice in trying to exhume and to recapture some of those buried potentials in order to become a more complete human being.

Those who by some accident had discovered cross-dressing had found a way to get at and to express some of these repressed and denied potentials. But all of them, which means about 99 percent of those who may read those words, suffered from a sense of being alone, of worrying whether they were gay or not or whether they were psychopathic because of their desires. Society programs you to think in terms of the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. So while it

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