Just wanted to update you on another outing. Went out Friday night to a dinner with a bunch of other girls. It was nominally a Rainbow Gender Association night out, but was mainly the celebrate the “birthday” of a local transsexual activist (it was the anniversary of her
GRS).
Anyway, it was out in Fremont, which is sort of like the Bay Area’s equivalent of the Valley (maybe Encino). Not the most enlightened part of town, but the restaurant was just down the street from I Love It Girl, where some of the girls have lockers. There were about a dozen and a half of us, mostly crossdressers as well as one girl with a boyfriend who I think was probably very passable transsexual, but also two women, one of whom also had a boyfriend. One of the women was Carla who owns a TG salon and the another women was apparently was a co-worker of someone.
Unfortunately, the restaurant put the reservation on the wrong night (or so they said) so we had to wait about a hour for them to be able to get enough tables together.
With a herd of us standing near the front door (not enough room in the foyer), it was pretty clear we were a bunch of trannies. It was fun watching the other customers coming out suddenly go bug-eyed for a moment. But no one said anything, and most of them just tried to act cool, although there was a few people (mostly women) who were clearly
uncomfortable and there were a few obviously amused people at the bar as we came in. I just did my bit by smiling sweeting at people at they passed by. Would’ve been nice to strike some conversation and do some education, but wasn’t really feasible.
It was kind of interesting seeing people’s reactions because I’d just run across an interesting research paper studying reactions to cross-dressing by gender. The researchers did surveys with a bunch Midwest college students before and after having them see a couple Tri-Ess speakers. Interestingly, although women were more likely to be accepting beforehand, they showed little increase in acceptance afterwards. While the men recorded the great change—apparently they were OK with it after being satisfied the crossdressers weren’t gay and otherwise were ordinary family guys aside from their “hobby.”
We were effectively in our own room, so didn’t really get to see other people’s reactions after that, but when we sang “Happy Birthday” to Roxie it was again one of those incongruent moment—lots of booming baritone voices.
Talking with some other girls other dinner, I learned there’s some interesting correlations between crossdressing and other hobbies. Apparently, there’s a lots people who are into ham radio, model trains or are pilots. Also a lot people are engineers or programmers.
Since of lot of these folks are also found in other alternative lifestyles—from the Rennaissance Faire, to BDSM, to Burning Man—my personal theory is a lot of these people have a non-rationale side that they normally keep repressed, but which “leaks” out in various forms. I’ve noticed this in other ways, for example these folks are often “religious” in their support of manned space travel. If you press them on why it’s a good idea, you get all sorts of responses that are driven by passion, rather than logic—and they don’t even
seem to realize it. Not sure if the ham radio thing might be a local phenommen, since this is Silicon Valley. But I’d heard model train thing elsewhere and it is kind of intriguing. I could see it as a parallel desire to create one’s own world.
There were some elderly crossdressers there as well and it was interesting to see how age made them fairly passable. They just looked like wrinkled up old ladies.
Another interesting bit of info came from one of the RGA officers. The internet has really caused a drop in the membership of the various transgender groups. Not really surprising, since people now have lots of other means of getting info and talking with others.
