Challenge Corner: New Challenges
Jim Eshelman
In a time when we see daily evidence of women casting aside restrictive traditional roles, I thought it would be interesting to offer four charts of men who had done the same; that is, men who have in one way or another rejected our culture’s delimiting view of what “man” means. One is a homosexual, one a transvestite, one a transsexual, and one has sabotaged his healthy sexual functioning. Which is which? Here are some behavioral and attitudinal clues.
(a) A homosexual is an individual whose primary sexual interests are in other people of his or her own gender. The gay man here shows absolutely no indications of being a transsexual or transvestite, and is very happy with his sex life.
(b) A male transvestite is a man who seeks to assume the identity of a woman through dress, padding, mannerisms, voice, etc. Most TVs speak of the need to actualize the female part of themselves. They do this through creating two sharply separated identity roles: their everyday male self and a female alter ego. As is true of most TVs, this man is heterosexual and is not a transsexual.
(c) In contrast, a transsexual is a person who from earliest memory (usually) finds himself/herself a prisoner in the wrong body—a woman trapped with the anatomy of a man, or vice versa. Sometimes, a TS will go through a “sex change” process to correct the error; but it is not the operation which makes them transsexual. Our sample here was born physiologically male, and did indeed go through the process of becoming a woman in body as well as soul.
(d) The particular dysfunction of the fourth individual is called Tardy Ejaculation (previously Retarded Ejaculation, previously Ejaculatory Incompetence—we’ve come a ways semantically). This means that he can achieve erection, but has extreme difficulty with ejaculation and orgasm. Tardy Ejaculators are characteristically controlling and withholding personalities who have great difficulty sharing themselves with another person, or freely giving love. This man is heterosexual and neither a TV nor TS.
Notice that all have prominent Neptunes and Sun-Pluto aspects (I’m including the 45 o and 135 o aspects), as well as other similarities. This is intentional. What else can you find to differentiate, astrologically, between the four?
BIRTHDATA
CHART 1: 1927 May 21, 11:30 PST, 117W51, 33N50
CHART 2: 1938 Sep 9, 3:47 PST, Los Angeles
CHART 3: 1942 Apr 22, 16:00 EST, 75W39, 40N15
CHART 4: 1940 Jul 27, 9:49 CDT, 87W41, 42N03
(In case it’s not clear, the order of charts given here does not correspond to the order of paragraphs a, b, c and d above.)
