RANSVESTIA

in today than it was in the earlier years and I'm proud to feel that I had a hand in making it that way.

I did take a short foreign trip in 1974 which was a two-week excur- sion to Mexico visiting a number of different places and ending up in Acapulco. It was a tour group but my partner-roommate was the same woman with whom I had shared accomodations on the Circle Pacific tour in 1970. We got on fairly well but it turned out that she was pretty much at odds with her own mother so that when I would make some suggestion out of consideration for her, like "don't you think you ought to take your sweater, it's getting kind of chilly tonight," she would bristle and get annoyed. I found out later that I was seen as carrying out the mother role by such comments and so she began to have the same feelings toward me as toward her mother. But once I found out what bugged her I stopped doing it and things smoothed out again. But it was an interesting aspect of my womanhood that I came on as too mothering.

But I didn't disappoint her any in my unusualness. She got altitude sickness in Mexico City and I was still going strong enough to climb the pyramid at the temple of the Sun at Teotehuacan about 30 miles outside of Mexico City. Then when we got to Acapulco I insisted on taking the parachute ride. They have a parachute attached to a speedboat out in the ocean. You stand on the beach strapped in and the boat takes off. You rise like a kite and sail along over the beach as the boat goes up the coast and back again. Since I had already earned my glider pilot's license this was of the same order and quite interesting. But as I was the only woman in our group to be so daring it was more of the same-androgeny that people can't quite under- stand. But then by this time I was ME and I did what I wanted to do whether it fell within the parameters of normal feminine behaviour or not. There was no point of getting out of the limitations of masculinity to adopt the limitations of femininity. That would just be trading prisons but to get out into the fields outside of either prison where you can be happy in "doing your own thing"-that is the real meaning of being a transgenderist. It is also one of the things that those who go in for surgery don't appreciate beforehand and can never enjoy afterward since they have switched prisons by equating what's between their ears with what's between their legs. So you change the latter you change the former and thus just close one cell door only to open up another and enter it. I think I have the best of both worlds.

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