A Dahl’s House

In “My Husband Betty” Helen Boyd makes an asute observation that cross-dressers often are envious of things genetic women take for granted: “They envy the easy friendship between women, the casual way women touch each other when they talk. Imagine a man gently brushing another man’s hair out of his eyes while they’re chatting! But women do that kind of thing all the time, even ones who aren’t especially feminine.”

I’ve always envied the way one my best friends can easily strike up a conversation with another woman she’s just met. Obviously, this isn’t dependent on gender. My friend is gregarious while I’ve always been social awkward around strangers. (Yes, despite being raised in California, I’m one of Garrison Keillor’s people.) But it does seem like there’s a big difference to the way two newly-introduced women interact compared to two guys.

The reverse is also true. I know many genetic women who envy men’s freedom to move in safety—something I didn’t truly understand until going out en femme.

Maybe this is one reason it’s difficult for women to understand why we do it. Partly, I think we’re not always able to clearly articulate some of these things precisely because they’re so “ordinary.” Partly, it’s when we do, women have a hard time seeing why these sorts of things might be special to us—I’ve often heard genetic women express puzzlement about our attraction to make-up. Of course, there’s also a big difference wanting to do something—like wearing skirts or make-up—and feeling obligated to do it.

Of course, like any other “grass is greener” feeling, it’s envying something that sometimes is illusionary, in part or in whole. My friend can be far cattier about other women—including those she just chatted merrily away with—than I would ever be. Likewise as any guy knows, thugs and bullies will happily beat up on a “weak” guy. And if they really want to prove they’re tough, they’ll start a fight with the biggest, baddest dude around. Transman Raven Kaldera relates how a fellow transman learned this the hard way. As a butch lesbian, she could get in guys’ faces and they’d back off because she was a woman. As a man she got decked immediately.

BTW, I intentionally used the word “envy,” which is a complex emotion. It’s both a grudging admiration and a painful desire for another’s advantages mixed with a simultaneous discontent and resentment at their advantages. In relationships it often involves love/hate. Love for your partner and hate for the power they have over you.

Years ago Nancy Friday wrote in her book “Jealousy” (which really focuses on envy and power relationships): “Today, many women don’t need men, either for their money or for their sperm, given society’s tolerance of women having children on their own. Men’s envy of our new found power may lessen as they get into women’s traditional areas of strength, namely beauty and the rearing of the children, but it hasn’t happened yet….We don’t yet have that new social structure. Returning to Patriarchy is out of the question, but as a new power structure emerges to replace it, we must understand more than ever the furies our dismantling of Patriarchy have released. Our fury at powerlessness—our envy—is stronger than ever, stronger than any feelings of love. The truth is that we cannot love until we understand envy and its relationship to jealousy.”

In that light, we crossdressers are at least open about our envies while in other men it often festers beneath the surface unacknowledged, even to themselves. We take those things we envy and make them our own—at least sort of our own, since we’re doing them en femme rather than en homme.

Sometimes it’s not pretty. As Kaldera says:

Sometimes when you drag out an opposite-sex persona – so to speak – you find that it’s been stashed in the same mental closet as all the things that you don’t like about the opposite gender, and they’ve become stuck all over it like barnacles, or growths. They won’t flake off until that persona has been exposed to the air for a while, and gotten a chance to rub up against real people and real circumstances. This may mean plowing through years of humiliating stereotypical behavior until that part of you evolves and grows into a fuller human being. I’ve seen it again and again, especially in people who are just starting to cross-dress or whose CD persona only gets out once in a while. Stereotypes abound: the trashy whore, the catty and manipulative upper-class bitch, the irresponsible little girl, the supported housewife who never has to work or deal with the outside world, the delicately passive – and utterly useless – ornament, and, of course, Mom. In the bedroom, the sexual stereotypes can be even more cartoon-like, from Sweet Gwen the Victim to the Dragon Lady, but is most commonly the passive, receptive do-me-queen that men don’t usually get to be. Sometimes their personas are clearly signposts pointing to the issues that they are bravely working through.

Women are often horrified and offended when men deliberately imitate women, whether it’s a female impersonator in a drag performance or a fetishistic cross-dresser in ratty nylons and a bad wig. They feel that these performances of female gender are a bad caricature, and don’t actually resemble the real experience of women. While it’s true that a performance, or even a persona, is by definition shallower than a person, there’s still a grain (or a sackful) of truth to these performances. For every one of these stereotypes being performed by men, I’ve met the same ones being performed by women, and in larger numbers. I’ve met the biologically female version of every one of these caricatures, and I’m sure that the women who complain about the guys in dresses probably have, too.

The one silver lining of envy is that by pointing out where we feel inadequate we can choose to address those perceived inadequacies. Instead of coveting the characteristics we wish we had, we can develop them for ourselves. Likewise, we can move from begrudged admiration to respectful appreciation when we see those qualities in others.

So what things taken for granted by the opposite sex do you envy?

“It’s not the clothes.” How many times have I said that when the lament of “women wear pants, so why can’t I wear a dress” surfaces with clockwork regularity on online crossdressers’ groups I belong to. Usually it’s in the context of making the what-ought-to-be-obvious point that women wearing men’s-styled clothing aren’t trying to portray themselves as the opposite gender, as crossdressers typically do. And yet, after reading Anne Hollander’s fascinating “Sex and Suits,” which looks at the evolution of modern men’s and women’s clothing, I wonder just how much of my crossdressing is in fact about the clothes.

(more…)

Just by being here, you’re already more accepting than you know. I don’t know if your SO had plans to disclose his dressing to you, but you found out about in the worse possible way. And you’ve discovered one reason crossdressers don’t tell their SOs—that by coming out to them, we either put them into a closet or have them face the same prejudices that we face. (BTW, I’m not saying it’s right to hide it, just that we often want to “protect” our SOs.)

For what it’s worth, crossdressing is quite common, about 5%-10% of men do it on a regular basis, and many more have experimented with it at some time or another.

It’s important to remember that his dressing has nothing to do with you—don’t worry that you’re not “not enough of a woman” for him, etc. It’s something he’s probably done since childhood and will continue doing for the rest of his life whether or not you’re with
him. The fact that he was willing to purge has everything to do with you—his love and devotion to you and he desire not to lose you.

Unfortunately, as you’ve discovered society has a lot preconceptions about crossdressing, which are almost entirely wrong. The vast majority of crossdressers are straight. Researchers have clearly established that sexuality and gender role identity are two
distinct things.

The reasons why we dress are many and varied, and are different from individual to individual. But there’s a couple main reasons. One is we like to look pretty and feel sexy in a way that’s allowed for women, but not really allowed for men. Another is to express a side of ourselves that society as deemed “feminine” (this is probably especially true of guys who are macho or Spock-like en homme, as many crossdressers seem to be). And it also can be an escape, both from the everyday pressure of life and the specific pressures of having to prove your manhood on a daily basis. (It’s pretty well documented that stress is
a common trigger for dressing.) In that sense dressing isn’t that different than putting on a Starfleet uniform for the chance to be someone else for awhile. But like any “grass is greener” envy, crossdressers don’t necessarily have an accurate view of what a woman’s life is really like. Often the way we dress and act probably has more to do with what we’re repressing than our actual view of women.

Because sexism is still all too present in our culture, it’s acceptable for women to act “masculine” (up to a point, of course), while men who want to emulate women are traitors to our gender for giving up the “male priviledge.” That makes a lot of people—male
and female—uncomfortable. And crossdressing also causes people confront their own stereotypes about what’s appropriate behavior—as well as the unconscious discomfort they may have with gender roles. All of these may be reasons why your friends think you’re strange to stay with your fiance. The irony of course is that many crossdressers while en femme display exactly the sort of sensitive qualities women keep saying they
want in a man.

I can understand how you feel isolated. Believe me, we understand. It’s possible with more education your friends may become more understanding. It’s possible, they may not. Probably a lot depends on their background and how rigidly they view gender roles. The good news is that there are good online communities where we crossdressers can listen and try to explain things from our perspective. There are also a number of SOs in various online forums—some accepting, some struggling with acceptance—who can do
the same. One them wrote a useful article about the “acceptance pendulum” many SOs go
through.

I know you’re struggling with this, but your SO is lucky to have someone as loving and accepting as you.

Well there’s discomfort with gender roles and discomfort with one’s sex (i.e. your body.) It’s been pretty well demonstrated that transsexual who get GRS have a fairly high degree of the latter. I think it’s likely the non-transitioning transsexuals and crossdressers have lower degrees of this—hence the “irresistable urge” part of it and the feeling that one has a tangible feminine side.

But I think discomfort with gender roles plays a bit part of it. I seem to remember some studies indicating a good percentage of men and women have personalities that fall outside the accepted norms for “masculine” and “feminine” personalities. It’s interesting to me that
there seem to be a lot of crossdressers from conservative social environments, where gender roles are typically more rigid, as well as the number of folks engaged in “logical/rational” profession, i.e. engineering, programming, etc. For the former group, “becoming” a woman may be a way to express aspects of their personalities that aren’t socially accept as a man. For the latter, I think crossdressing is a way of letting out the non-rational parts of their personalities that they normally keep in check. (It’s interesting that engineers, programmers, etc. are often over-represented in other “alternative” activities from the Rennaissance Faire to Burning Man, to Trekking, where they also have a
chance to become someone else.)

Lately, I’ve become intrigued by the question of why there are so few female crossdressers (although crossdressing play is more prominent in the lesbian community) when there are a good number of MTF transsexuals, especially if you factor in the stone butches and other strongly butch lesbians who to my outside eye often seem like they’re exhibiting transgender-ish behavior. The obvious answer is the greater flexibility in clothing, but that
ignores the fact that it’s intent that makes it crossdressing rather just wearing clothes of the opposite sex.

There’s an interesting female parallel to cross-dressing: tomboyism. From the research I’ve run across there’s two types of tomboyism, the first and widely common is “expansive” (i.e. wanting to play with dolls and trucks), while a minority of tomboys reject female behavior and sometimes even deny they’re girls. Lesbians (especially butches) have a much higher likelihood than “normal” of having been tomboys, especially the second type. But interestingly, bisexual women, who self-identified as andrgynous at suprisingly high rates,
had a strong likelihood of recalling being tomboys part of the time. Raven Kaldera, a transman, mentions having seen some female crossdressers and says they typically begin in their 20s. (Unfortunately, he doesn’t mention if any of them were tomboys, so I don’t know if it’s a resumption of behavior or something new. But my suspicion is the later
onset is because when the social pressures that typically put an end to tomboyism are weaker.)

The sum of this suggests to me that there’s a number of women who’ve got similar gender discomfort to us MTF crossdressers (at varying levels). Things do get murky because discomfort with gender role has been the focus of feminism, whereas with men there’s really not been a widespread equivalent. Women with gender role discomfort turn to feminism, where men with gender role discomfort may turn to crossdressing. Another factor is that MTF presentation involves “dressing up” whereas “masculine” women
generally are “dressing down” (short hair, not wear much, if any make-up, “practical” clothes, etc.) And of course the great range of acceptable clothing for women. So MTF crossdressing involves an overt awareness of what you’re doing, whereas women don’t necessarily have to been as self-aware, as in fact probably see it more as “not being
girly” than “being masculine.”