I’m one of the perhaps 1 in 20 American men who is a regular crossdresser—also known as transvestites. My nom de femme is Lean Dahlstrom and I’m “out in public” but not “out,” as I’ll talk about in a bit. 
But first let me answer the questions that everyone invariably asks. No, I’m not gay—the vast majority of crossdressers are heterosexual and most of us are married. Second, unlike transsexuals, we’ve got no desire to actually become women, instead we’re just happy taking the occasional gender vacation. Finally, while in private, many crossdressers may engage in stylized femininity similar to our more flamboyant sisters, drag queens, those of who go out in public generally shun the attention that drag queens seek. Those of us who are skilled—and blessed with petite physiques—walk among you unnoticed. In short, we bear very little resemblance to Tim Curry in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Most of us, as a friend mine put it, are regular guys, but when we slip into a dress and put on a little makeup, we’re the girls next door.My story is pretty typical, so I won’t bore you with the details. I started in late boyhood and did it off-and-on for years, depending on the strength of the urge and circumstances. Fortunately, unlike many of my sisters (in our community it’s considered polite to use references appropriate to one’s presented gender) I’ve never felt particularly guilty about my urge to cross the gender line. Unfortunately most of us do. If you’ve seen “Brokeback Mountain,” the sort of shame and confusion Jack and Ennis feel is all too common in our ranks. While thankfully I never felt that, I did realize it was something “different” that I wasn’t about to tell my friends and family about, so all my crossdressing was done in the private. About a year ago, I got tired of being all dressed up with no place to go and started going out in public en femme—a step most of us are terrified to make. First to the “bigger closet” of transgender-friendly places and then out in public to all the places that other folks go. Do I get the occasional stare and giggle? Yes I do. Believe me, it takes balls to be a public crossdresser.Helen Boyd, author of the excellent “My Husband Betty” describes our situation well:
Crossdressers’ struggles are the place where rigid gender roles come crashing into the reality of human experience. Today’s crossdressers are the cultural equivalent of gays and lesbians of the 1940s, still in the closet, still in secret societies, still trying to convince themselves they can control and repress an integral part of their personalities. And they do so in the midst of gay liberation, women’s liberation, and everyone else’s liberation. They alone sit, still rattling the hangers in the closet. If the 20th Century was the era of sexual revolution, then surely the 21st is the era of gender revolution, and crossdressers, the most invisible of the gender-variant rainbow, indicate with their very lives exactly where our past notions of gender-derived roles collide with our emerging understanding of ourselves as individuals and as a society as a whole. We can understand—even if we can’t relate to—the transsexual. A person is born and raised in a body that seems wrong; their interests are female and they have male parts, and modern technology—surgery, hormones, therapy, and all the love and support they can find—helps align the body to the person within.Drag queens are comprehensible: they are about performance, humor, glamour. Their femininity and their homosexuality are larger than life. RuPaul was taken seriously enough to have a hit single and a M.A.C. ad campaign.But no one really knows who cross-dressers are. Even the ones who have come out are baffling to their families, friends and wives, and often to themselves. They don’t understand the need to dress and don’t understand why they can’t. A crossdressing trucker’s wife can’t comprehend why her otherwise masculine husband would risk his safety and her sanity by wearing panties under his jeans while he drives. The worst of it is that he usually hasn’t got an answer that satisfies her, usually no more than “I like to.” Psychologists’ answers are no better.Straight heterosexual cross-dressers find themselves between the rock that is their dominant cultural position, courtesy of their status as straight men, and the hard place of being primarily invisible to not only the society at large, but to their wives, and often, sadly, to themselves.One reason for blogging is to let other folks on the transgender spectrum know that the world isn’t as scary a place as they might think. Yes I’ve gotten the occasional snicker, but on the whole I find people are willing to treat me like a lady. I act like I deserve respect and I usually get it.Why do we do it? That the $64,000 question—one that many of us ask ourselves a lot. As Helen alludes to, researchers occasionally look at the question too, but frankly since we generally function well in the rest of our lives, far more attention has been given to transsexuals since there’s a need to understand who might benefit from and who might be hurt by transitioning. In part it’s difficult question because we’re a disparate group—the term “crossdressers” encompasses everyone from panty hose fetishists to folks who turn out to be transsexuals in denial. So neither we nor the researchers have come up with definite answers, although we’ve got some good ideas. Another big reason for this blog is to help myself explore some of the reasons myself. I hope you’ll find it interesting and see that while it may be “different,” it’s not abnormal. Is it eccentric? Probably, but there are a lot of eccentrics in this world.
