left to play with only the 26 black ones and we might quite rightly say to him, "You are playing (living) with only half a deck"! Meaning that he is not all he might be if he had access to all his resources. This process of segregation and suppression of half of ourselves is what results in boys and girls and later men and women. They are, of course, also males and females but that fact has little to do with the area we are discussing.
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Those of us who discover through accident, curiosity or someone else's design such as giv- ing us a girls part in a play or sug- gesting that we go to a masquer- ade party as a girl or even inten- tionally dress us up in girls clothes whether for fun, for necessity (such as no boys clothes being momentarily availa- ble after a rainstorm say, or even as punishment succeed in punching a hole in the wall be- tween the genders and for the moment we crawl through it and discover a tiny bit of what it is like to live on the other side of the wall and we find it good and worth repeating. Because remem- ber, the other side of the wall is not some foreign country, some- thing weird, infectious or psy- chopathic, but rather it is a part of our own house which we have been locked out of during our earlier life. And knowing that it is actually part of our own pro- perty which we have been denied access to because the guardians of our lives (parents, teachers and society) have believed that it was not good for us, i.e. it would be damaging to our travel along the predetermined path for penis people and would prevent or in- terfere with our achieving the position of a MAN in our society
I think therefore that the real explanation of the behaviour known as cross dressing is due primarily to the fact that we live in a culturally divided society. Once we have discovered those
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red cards the other half of our we do not want original deck to lock them away again in spite of what parents, teachers, peers, psychiatrists and society think about it. In short, we are not cross dressers because we are gay, or because we are psychopathic in some way, or because we have criminal intent to masquerade but plainly, simply and, I should think, obviously, because we have simply decided that there are aspects to life and living which have been denied us and when we discover them we don't want to give them up. Now I am not referring to clothing itself as such. True we don't want to give up the panties and the heels, but panties and heels in and of them- selves are not important (except to fetishists) rather it is what they represent that is important. People who wear panties and heels live a different kind of life playing with their red cards in those other rooms in our house and when we wear the panties and heels we become like those other people (women) and we find the change very refreshing and invigorating.
So, to conclude: I believe that the explanations I have called ex- ternal are really falacious and not worth thinking about. The gene- tic, fetal environmental and hor- monal explanations are not really explanations because while they have their effects on the body and even in some ways on mental processes there is no link be- tween them and clothing, or makeup or hairstyles, or jewelry
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or any of the other parts of the TV bahaviour pattern that we all enjoy. The clothing and the rest are merely the wall through which we pass to get to the other side. It is a uniform worn by those who play with red cards and when we wear the uniform we have access to our own red cards and can play with them on the other side of the wall. Since clothing of whatever kind is a cultural phenomenon I look to culture itself as the cause of cross dressing since wearing the clothes of the opposite gen- der is a crossing of a cultural boundary. It is not a crossing of a sexual boundary, nor an ana- tomical one (TSS do this but they are a special case), nor yet a physiological one such as the hormonal idea. If boys and girls alike had the freedom to wear whatever they wanted there would not be any cross dressing regardless of genes, hormones or any other biological factors. The fact that a very large number of young feminist women these days are in effect TVs too since they mimic not only mens cloth- ing but their behaviour drink- ing, smoking, swearing, muscle building, giving others "the fin- ger" -- a representation of the ul- timate in male behaviour - shows that their revolution is against cultural patterns they feel are too limiting and from which they seek liberation. How does this in reality differ from male cross dressing which is an escape from a too limiting cultural idea im- posed on males (largely by other males with macho ideas of course) and from which we seek release and freedom to do our thing? So I think the sociological explanation is really the only one which holds water and covers the
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