When Barbara was 12 she had her first homosexual experience. During preadolescence, however, she had engaged in extensive petting and masturbation with both boys and girls. Her sexual drive was experienced as uncontrollable, completely dominating her life, involving her in compulsive daily masturbation accompanied by rituals and intrusive sexual fantasies. These practices and fantasies interfered with her ability to concentrate at school. Indeed, from the fourth grade on her school work had deteriorated. By the ninth grade she could no longer sit at a desk, and quit school. Her increased gender anxiety coincided with two events: Frances's return to the family and her first period. With the onset of menses Barbara felt crushed. There was no turning back; she had to accept an inevitable, but harsh, reality - she was a girl!

Barbara was horrified by her breast development. In an attempt to stave off her emerging femaleness, Barbara bound her breasts with an Ace bandage and began wearing a shirt and tie. In a blind rage she was fighting her biology, a battle which she could never win. The final blow came when the school authorities forced her to wear a skirt or dress to school. Feeling totally defeated she succumbed to her inner male feeling and withdrew from school, stuffing herself with food until she gained almost seventy five pounds and appeared massive and bloated. She experienced what is known as a masked or smiling depression, marked by psychogenic arthritis and the employment of massive denial.

Having dropped out of school Barbara, now 14 years old, stayed at home masturbating compulsively and engaging in impulsive homosexual activity (entertaining an unending stream of girls in her bedroom). Mother's reaction was to become violent, humiliating and harassing Barbara about her homosexuality. By threatening to abandon Barbara, she controlled her daughter, coercing her into a submissive masochistic, clinging dependent relationship with mother. No matter how valiantly Barbara attempted to thwart her homosexual desires, she was unsuccessful. The choice was clear: either Barbara continued to identify as a homosexual and was abandoned by her mother, or she abandoned her homosexual orientation and received her mother's love. Again she was forced to do battle with her biological strivings. Desperately yearning for mother's love, and driven by her homosexual orientation, Barbara arrived at a "solution," a solution which permitted her to avow openly her secret male wishes. She hoped that if mother was convinced that she was a male then mother would view her daughter's sexual feelings for women as heterosexual. In a desperate effort she began to consolidate her male role and identity; picturing herself as a male trapped inside a female's body, she hoped to allay mother's anxiety that she was homosexual. This rationalization, a product of a subtle disorder in her thinking, while helping Barbara to crystallize her male identity, did not placate mother's irrational homophobia (see TRANSSEX - THE IMPULSIVE PSYCHOPATH: BARBARA/BRIAN PART VI).