The one great advantage the serious transvestite or transsexual has is that he will already have strong feminine tendancies and an overwhelming desire to develop and amplify his femininity. By Wendy Robyns

If you ask any number of competent actors what they consider to be the secret of their ability to portray some person other than themselves, whether it be their own sex or not, with such conviction that other people believe totally in the authenticity of the character represented, they may all place different emphasis upon different aspect of the art of acting or role playing. However, the one element that will be common to virtually all of them will be not simply the skill to pretend to be, or to look like the character in question, but the ability to get inside it - to intuitively sense the very essence of the person in question to become that person, as it were.

Of course, many actors will also tell you that a walking stick, or a pipe or a handbag, or an umbrella, or almost any 'prop' you care to mention, can also help to give you a deeper insight into the character, at least from a physical point of view.

Transvestite

How then does this appertain to a transsexual or a transvestite? After all, they are not actors, surely. But, on the contrary, that is what they are. They are role playing just as an actor does or, for that matter, essentially every human being to some extent. The added difficulty for the transsexual or transvestite is that he is simply playing another character, but also another sex!

The main reason why this is so much more difficult is that, where as the actor is able to call upon all sorts of life experiences, the transsexual or transvestite can only call upon observations they have made of the female sex. Therefore, if he is to successfully become a woman he has to call upon all his imaginative powers to project himself as completely as possible into his feminine persona. All this has to be done by him without any actual experience upon which to call. He has to become female through his imagination, and to sense his understanding of how a female feels and reacts.

Attitudes

Needless to say, this an is an extremely difficult thing to do, and is useless to pretend otherwise. Woman have spend their own lives exploring and practicing their femininity, helped by their mothers. Indeed, their entire environment from birth has conditioned them into femininity - the pretty clothes they wear, the dolls they play with, the help they give their mothers in the house, the wariness they learn to develop towards men.

All this helps to condition them to a totally different attitude to life to that developed by boys.