RANSVESTIA

take lessons on weekends. I thought I should be learning power flight, too, so for several months it was power one weekend 40 miles N.W. of L.A. and the next week glider instruction 100 miles east of L.A. My power instructor told me that I should go to ground school which I did for about four meetings. I then suddenly realized that there was more to learn on the ground than there was in the air and more over what would I do with a power license if I got it? I wasn't able to buy a plane and if I wanted to go somewhere I'd go by commercial airline, so why a pilot's license? Additionally, I now had enough hours in both kinds of flying to realize that powered flight was pretty much like driving a car in the air. You always had that motor out in front of you doing the work and all you had to do was steer and remember a lot of rules of the road and mechanical matters like carburetor heat, etc. In a glider, on the other hand, there is no motor and thus it becomes a personal contest and challenge between you and the atmosphere to see if you can get up and stay up, contend with sink, and enjoy lift, etc.

So I told my power instructor my decision and said goodbye to him, forgot about ground school and power license and concentrated on the glider. I therefore got my private glider license-as a woman-in 1973, and at the age of 60. It is interesting to note in making up the Tri Sigma Directory how many FPs list flying as one of their interests. Most are power pilots, of course, but there are some glider pilots amongst us, too.

In the late summer of that year I again went to Europe and to Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia for the third International Erickson Sym- posium on Transexuality. To this group I presented the results of some research that I had done with Dr. Bentler of the Psychology Depart- ment at UCLA. We had sent out questionnaires through doctors to be sent to their operated transexual patients to be filled in anonymously and returned. We got back 42. On the basis of their own statements we could divide the group into 15 self-ascribed pre-surgical homo- sexuals, 14 heterosexuals (a transvestic group) and 13 of what we called asexuals simply because they didn't really fit into either of the other two groups. We made the interesting finding-which bore out my expectations expressed so many times in TVia-that the homo- sexual groups had a much greater score on all questions relating to sex and low on gender questions such as, "Is the opportunity to dress and live as a woman more important to you than the opportunity to have sex with a male?" The hetero group was high on gender and

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