RANSVESTIA

I could really say that I had finally wiped out guilt, so I signed up for the session. I wrote this up in some detail in TVia No. 52 but it was really a turning point in my life-traumatic because I had the longest crying jag in my life but nevertheless, I found that I WAS Virginia regardless of what my anatomy said. And more than that the others present treated me according to my own evaluation of myself and not in terms of my visible anatomy. This was before I had my own hair and before I had any effects from hormones. It may have been even before I started them, I don't remember for sure. At the end, when we were all sitting around dressed again and having a little re- cap of the experience for each of us, I remember breaking out in tears agains as I said, "You have no idea what it is like to have to wait 40 years, 40 years to find a group of people who will accept you for what you want to be, not just on the basis of what you are." You see, this group of people had accepted and treated me like a woman even though we were all nude and my maleness was perfectly evi- dent. I had worn a wig when I arrived so that they first saw me in a feminine hairdo as well as clothing but when we went in to the pool, I had to remove it and all I could do was to come some of the side hairs out on my cheeks in a sort of old fashioned "spit curl." I did, however, help them by wearing an hibiscus flower in my hair.

So I hope you can see what a terrific impact this experience had on my self identity. If others could accept my womanhood, when they could also see my maleness, why should I have any difficulty accepting it myself. And if I could, why should I feel guilty about it? So the experience had finally put an end to the long years of guilt that we have all experienced. From that day on, my self identity was between my ears, not between my legs where, unfortunately, it remains for most people including most TVs.

Now up to this point in the story I have used the abbreviation TV for transvestite. I was the one who developed this term in the first place, way back in the early fifties when I first met others of my own kind and had to have a way of talking about the subject in the pre- sence of other unknowing people, without giving things away. How- ever, it is time to say something about the word transvestite and the abbreviation TV. Originally, as most of you know, the word was in- vented by Hirschfeld, the German sexologist, to refer specifically to heterosexual cross dressers and it was used in this way from the time he invented it early in this century up until the late fifties and early

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