This is a picture from my country, Latvia, next to the Baltic Sea

And here are some parts of an article I wrote for a British magazine, the "TV Repartee". I do not identify myself as a "TV/CD" anymore, but this is what I discovered years ago. Recently I discovered that these things can be said about quite a number of nice places...

To be a TV in a transitioning country...

I can fancy that there must be real princesses in closet around here. With a population of 2.3 million, there ought to be hundreds of transgendered people in Latvia. Alas! They lock their doors and choose to keep on sleeping on that pricking pea H. Ch. Andersen invented for the ultimate princess, and they choose the worst form of seclusion: ignorance. They rob themselves of their selves.

We do not officially punish and humiliate people for being homosexual, or allegedly such, anymore; but we allow people to hate their selves, by exposing the public opinion on them before they even hear it. T-persons are read by themselves before they endeavour to leave closet to give others the opportunity. What should we offer TG people here? Shall we start from where the democracies started decades ago? Promises? Say, soon we will be able to go to any T-party in Europe... which is at a distance, although we were genetically European before the Russian invasion.

By reading T-editions, I have started opening a world of wonderful people for me. This also opens much in myself. I feel what T-life is about, though this cannot be grasped at once. This explains a lot of things in the world. It makes the world one, and yourself somebody in it. Books is theory. You may trust your doctor, but doctors are not priests; many priests do not like us. I kept asking myself the questions that may have been asked by everyone in the gender world. I threw out and burned everything feminine several times, and felt desolated again. I wondered, why? The answers are coming little by little to me.

Humankind really loves the woman. Even women love themselves more than men do. Men are imperfect. Some natural incongruity exists between man and woman (the number of girls impersonating guys is miserable as compared to the opposite). Most artists love women. They make their ideal woman appear from clay, on canvas, on the screen. I share the belief that the man who painted His Lisa, made a picture of himself. If Our Lord is He, Woman has been His greatest achievement. TV's are artists in a way. Like all art, transvestitism has a number of talents, artisans, and a good deal of failures. It can even be learned. Psychologists may think that all art is sublimation of sexual behaviour one does not perform in "reality".

I deem those TV's who can step onto stage to be adored for their feminine image they impersonate to be the luckiest. In the West, this takes more inner struggle, as we tend to stress the individual as opposed to everything. In the East, a boy may be even punished for non-adherence to the "role" thrust upon him without ever asking his opinion. Those who say that "men in drag" are unwell, must also admit that several Eastern cultures are afflicted and Shakespeare wrote his plays to be enacted by imbeciles.

For most TV's who will never achieve the heights of impersonation, the perfect woman is still beside us. As soon as the "ideal she" becomes mass production, it has little to do with creativity. You cannot buy your ideal pretzel at a reasonable market price. But you can try to bake it, and make it with love.