On Cross-Dressing and TG

Author:

Dorothy Colleen

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On Cross-dressing and Transgender

There are, in my opinion, a number of levels to cross-dressing and transgendered tendencies. (For the sake of this essay, I will only deal with Male to Female, mostly because that’s the side I know best).

The first level of cross-dressing I call Mild. At the Mild level, a man occasionally has a desire to dress like a woman. He may indulge this desire on occasions, but rarely does it cause him any great distress if he cannot. Many men at this level may call cross-dressing a hobby, no different in their mind than other men taking up golf as a form of relaxation. For this reason, they rarely have much guilt feelings associated with cross-dressing. They may have a female name to use when dressed, but have no particular attachment to it. Lastly, they have no desire to change sex, or becoming feminine in any serious way.

The second level, I call Moderate. At the Moderate level, a man has a much stronger desire to cross-dress, and may suffer from distress if that desire is prevented. The man may still call it a hobby, but it has become a hobby that requires a lot of his time and attention. They may have at least some amount of guilt associated with it, and may occasionally have periods of “purging”, and “binging” where they get rid of all traces of the cross-dressing, only to go on a buying spree to replace what they have gotten rid of. This is the level that best describes at least some men who are regarded as suffering from a fetish. Their female name is more important than at the mild level, and some at this level have positive responses to the name totally apart from when they are dressed. At least some of the men at this level may seek help in controlling their desires, and/or try and find an acceptable outlet for their need. Lastly, they may at least consider techniques to be more feminine, but still identify as male.

The third level I refer to as Serious. At the serious level, the person suffers from significant distress if prevented from cross-dressing. It cannot really be called a hobby at this level, and indeed has more in common with addiction. The man may have serious amounts of guilt associated with dressing, and are much more likely to have “binging” and “purging”. They may still be classified as suffering from a fetish, but they also may be regarded as at least mildly transsexual They will have a positive reaction to their female name. They are likely to seek help, either to control the desire, or to bring the desire to life in a practical way. Lastly, they have seriously considered or taken steps to be more feminine, and may refer to themselves as girls at least some of the time, and may use terms such as “part-time girl.”

The fourth level I call Critical. At this level, the person is utterly addicted to dressing, or being as feminine as possible. They may suffer from a great amount of guilt, and “purge” , but almost always return as soon as feasible. They are often regarded as being transsexual. They will have almost as positive reaction to their female name as to any item of female clothing. They will often seek help, but attempts to control their desire will usually fail, and will end up having to accept it as part of who they are. Lastly, if at all possible, they will take whatever steps they can to be as feminine as possible, and although they may still call themselves a “part-time girl”, it might be more true to say they feel like a part-time boy..

The last level is Total, otherwise called Transsexual. Dressing isn’t all that important except as part of being accepted as the female they feel like they are. While they may still suffer from guilt, and purge, the desire will no be denied forever. They regard their female name as their true one, and the male name as a disguise. Eventually they will seek help or be forced to do so. All attempts to repress the need to be female will fail. They eventually must become female, or suffer. They may retain some aspects of their male lives, or none.

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Oh my

I'd recommend to remove your little theory, cause imho this is highly controversial if not subversive.

Ultimately, if I read your drabble correctly, you're saying that transsexuals are male with a pathological need to dress and appear female.

Please. If you feel the need to justify your occasional hankering into anything female, try not to hitch a ride -albeit in the boot- on the transsexual bandwagon with such pseudo-psychology. You are not helping.

If males wish to dress themselves now and again in something flashy and fluid, let their hair down, and coo and giggle to their hearts' content: Just do it. Feel free. Don't be ashamed, there's nothing wrong with wanting to dress nice and soft, glam yourself up, and enjoy a night on the town. Women do it all the time, why should you deny yourself?

But! Don't confuse reality with some far-fetched theory where there's something like the 'gliding scale'. It's a myth! Either you're male with a tendency to cross-dress in whatever fashion and/or interval, back to male whenever appropriate. Or more safe.
Or you are not, born in the wrong body, and ergo transsexual. With all the agony, heartache, frustration, contempt, and the -often long- arduous road to come to some sort of semblance of whom you should have been right from the start.

Jo-Anne

Why force it into a binary?

Not just a question to you, Jo-Anne, but to the Original Poster.

Why is it, "Either you're male with a tendency to cross-dress in whatever fashion and/or interval, back to male whenever appropriate. Or more safe. Or you are not, born in the wrong body, and ergo transsexual," are the only options? Forcing gender into a binary when there is statistically one out of every fifty-nine people that are born NEITHER gender but somewhere in between and the variation between is not a myth, it's a FACT.

Frankly, if you are talking about numbers, since one {1} of every fifty-nine {59} births are statistically intersexed, that means that it is a CERTAINTY that if you know one hundred nineteen {119} people, one of them is in some way intersexed. They may not even realize it themselves, but it's there.

Gender is really outdated. You might say that we're very much wired as a society to believe that there's only 2 answers ... gender isn't just male or female. There's a plethora of options between, why do we have to stick with one or the other? It's not a yes/no binary question. It's like asking someone from Canada, "Do you live in Montreal or Quebec?" with absolutely no expectation of any other answer - it's completely ridiculous.

-- Trysha E'Layne Kaneko (which is ME, but under a former name)

You don't have to shout..

Well, yes why indeed? Gosh, well you're so right: Gender is outdated. If judged from a scholastic hypothetical view.

You have my blessing, you don't need it, but whatever. Live in a third, fourth or any given degree of gender you want to. If it makes you happy. Me, I'll stick with the old ways. I don't feel the need to break ground for a plethora of little fragments of perception in gender-identity.

I know people who have crossed the gender-divide more than once, up and down, and crossways. Power to them, but it's not me. I live in the big great two gendered world, where I've fought and found my place. I've no intention to become a new Don ( or Donna ) de La Mancha.

Good hunting. :)

Jo-Anne

Your Perception

...is yours, and you're certainly entitled to it, but I would challenge you to cite either your sources or your data. If it is based on the direct observation of multiple individuals, how many individuals is that, for what period did you observe them, how much of this is based on interviewing them, and what was the extent of those interviews?

Absent that, it seems to me you're making certain assumptions, and a lot of extrapolations. It also seems to me that you're making use of a common fallacy, that gender presentation (or "aesthetic") is related to gender identity. In fact, some eminent therapists who counsel patients and lecture on the subject to other therapists see them as two separate axes in a multi-axis model of human sexuality and gender.

A small group of us (four, to be exact) held a discussion in a chatroom on one such presentation, and digested our understanding into this:

The Seven Scales Of Sex And Sexuality (Click Here).

In order to broaden the discussion, I'd like you to consider the implications of this. It provides a system that can be used to classify all* persons in terms of gender and sexuality, not just the TG. This includes trans and cis, sissies and tomboys, twinks and bears, femmes and butches, monogamists and sluts, slaves and masters, gay and straight. Every single individual you know* can be described using these seven scales.

Drag Queens, female impersonators and Drag Kings engaged in public performance, whether professionally or just for entertainment, get excluded from these models, on the grounds that it's theater/acting/professional, not personal. Outside of their public performances, however, the same system applies.

Another point I'd like to make is that people go through various changes of intensity over time. This especially applies to Aesthetic, which is perhaps the most fluid of the characteristics. In the world of women's fashion (read a few magazines and you'll see what I mean), much emphasis is put on mood, feelings, and expression. One's presentation is a conscious effort based on that, and as one's mood changes, so can how you present yourself, not only over longer periods like seasons, but within hours.

_______
* except, as noted, intersex, who by nature of their ambiguous physical attributes, break the model's axis of birth gender, and also get excluded from diagnoses of transgender.

Oh Gosh! Oh Golly. Oh dear, Dear! DEAR!!

I started to answer this before Jo Anne and I had exactly the same axe to grind. However Big closet cut me off with the strange morning cut-out device.

I might 'rub along' with your gradations of transvestism up to level 4 as you have listed them.
I'm not entirely happy with them though and I feel it would only serve the crude needs of beaurocrats and statisticians who would wish to somehow serve up a nice tidy 'pie chart' to some government for the dispensation of funds. Such simplistic gradations serve only to 'tick boxes' and do little to satisfy each transgendered individuals' perceptions of him or her self.
For example I suppose if I was to allow myself to be pidgeon-holed by some bearuocrat using your grades tyhen I might allow myself to be placed, (albeit unwillingly,) between level 2 and level 3.

But hold on! This doesn't seem to fit my profile or my own perceptions of myself. We are all so different and my little foible clearly put's me outside your convenient little boxes.

You see, I have taken hormones and enhanced my breasts but I have absolutely no intentions of 'going all the way' I am a transvestite, not a transsexual. However, when I dress, I savour my real breasts as they fill out my UK., size 14 dresses and 'b/c cup' bras. They bring me great pleasure. When en-homme, a loose shirt and 'tee-shirt' serves to hide my little beauties.

So you see, even though I'll rub along with such simplistic classifications, (anything for the quiet life.) I still feel somebody might be trying to pidgeonhole me into a hole that I don't much like.

Even worse is what I believe to be your grevious error with your perception of transsexuals in level 5.

Here I feel you are seriously mistaken!

A transsexual is, I believe, an individual who has been born with the 'wrong body, or perhaps more accurately, 'the wrong plumbing,!

For example lets consider the female transsexual. This I believe is a girl born with the wrong genitalia and she is forced to endure this distressing condition until she can finally convince the (often conservative, judgemental and censorious,) doctors that she want's shot of those grotesque and incongrous deformities 'down there'.

The female transsexual is NOT cross dressing when she's wearing a frock or dress or skirt. She is indeed, dressing in what is correct for her gender, and that gender is to be found between her ears NOT between her legs!!
For example, when we meet 'the man in a frock' who is a transexual who was sadly denied access to enlightened medication and hormone treatment as a child, she is still a girl (or a woman') who is cursed with a 'male body'! Even though she may resemble Arnold Swartzenieger in a frock, SHE IS STILL NOT CROSS DRESSED IF SHE IS A TRANSSEXUAL!!!

She is actually cross-dressing when her parents or education authorities force her to wear boys clothes as a child and/or when attending school simply because a there is penis and possibly a pair of functioning testicles between her legs.
This individual never was, never has been and never will be a transvestite.
Sadly Dear Dot, I'm afraid you've laid yourself open to a whole tirade of anger from your definition of category five.
If I were you darling, I'd batten down the hatches for the next couple of days.
I hope that I have perhaps averted some of the flack you are going to receive from just about every transsexual who reads your article.
Dorothy! My advice is,
DUCK!!

Sadly, our transsexual sister may appear to be 'a man in a frock'! because she never had access to proper treatment or informed medicine as a child and she was forced to grow up tormented by her male body but in her head SHE IS A WOMAN!!!
The lucky transsexuals are those who can 'pass' and as we all know in the TG community, there are now more and more of them growing up thanks at last to the education and enlightenment of doctors. (Though it's taken far too many years!!)
The campaign we have to fight is that campaign for our transsexual sister who cannot pass because of body size and shape. They also must be allowed a life!!!

XOXOXO.

Beverly.

Where's my post gone!

Something is wrong with the site!
I posted a long article running something similar to Jo Anne's observations.

Where did it go.
Beverly Taff.

Keep smiling

Wow, that touched a few nerves.
I am no expert on these things, but I was fine with the sliding scale for cross dressing, but I have no idea how a transexual feels so will not comment beyond life as a cross dresser.
But please relax, it is only an opinion, just someones view of the world. How can we possibly say how life is in someone else shoes when most of us hardly understand ourselves anyway.
Keep smiling
Lauran

Learning Opportunity

I think you read some hostility into my remarks that really isn't there. This is an area that definitely needs more study and thought if we are to enlighten ourselves and others. Dorothy Colleen is to be commended for seeking to find more order and patterns in our community than appear in most people's understanding and conclusions about us.

If you reread my remarks above, other than a bit of impatience at her missing (in my opinion) the mark, you'll see that all I'm trying to do is publicize a more comprehensive model suggested by a professional in the field, and offer support for it.

It's an extraordinarily useful model, if everyone would understand it and accept the basic concept behind its structure. It baffles me why crossdressers and transsexuals are often at each other's throats, but I think this lack of understanding is part of the reason.

We (CDs and TSes) don't exist in a vacuum. We're just a couple of branches on the big tree of human gender and sexuality that happen to stick out. I guess my main point is, we're not even branches that are in the same area of the tree.

___________________
If a picture is worth 1000 words, this is at least part of my story.

Interesting

way for you to get somethings organized in your head.

Personally, it doesn't work for me. As others have said, gender presentation and gender identity are not directly linked.

I believe professional definitions are still in flux, and probably will be for many years to come (I hesitate to say decades, but it could well be in that range).

Twenty-five years ago, my shrink spent a good bit of time working through whether it was ME that was a girl, or whether it was the clothing and presentation. She kept coming back to the issue over several months. Part of it was probably caused by some of my history and how I worded things, but part a genuine desire to understand who I was and where I was.

In my case, I couldn't say that I knew I was a girl since before I was in school - since, as far as my memories are concerned, I didn't exist prior to 5th grade. At the time, part of the criteria for diagnosis as transexual was this kind of knowledge.

A second area was my difficulty in conceiving that I could be a woman - I'd been taught that there are two types of people (male & female) and what you had (or didn't have) hanging between your legs determined that. So, my desire to have & nurse a baby, and (well, you can guess...) as well as my desire to wear pretty clothing/look pretty (a tall order, I know) made me think I was crazy. And, that's actually why I went to the shrink in the first place. To help me deal with what I was convinced marked me as crazy.

So, it was a combination of the shrink and I getting past my preconceptions and my learning that there's not a discrete set of categories (though some broad ones are still used), but rather sliding scales.

Attire and presentation are only indirectly related to who you are on the inside. I know one lady that wears what would normally be considered men's clothing (leather shoes, slacks, belt, tie, etc.) she gets her shoes shined with the men, and thinks nothing of it. That's HER. But, she also has NO doubt that she's a woman. She's not trying to look like a man. She's just more comfortable in the kind of clothing that is generally considered "normal" in "corporate/professional male" America (or was before "business casual" became more common. I've talked to (but don't know as well) men that enjoy wearing what's generally considered women's clothing. They are men, want to (or have) father children, etc. They just like or prefer the clothing. Do the majority of people wear what's considered "gender normal" clothing? Yeah, but who defines "normal". Normal's changed over the past few hundred years.

Is desire to be nurturing an indication of being female? No. I know women who would far prefer to never have ANYTHING to do with children. Just like there are men who love caring for them.

Who are we, really? That's hard for anyone outside our heads to really know. I prefer to say my head and my heart, but that's me talking. For most of 40 years (I'd say 50, but I can't recall the first 10 or so, except in brief snapshots) I did my best to "pretend" to be a guy. Once I understood who I really was, it was both easier and harder. I was really close to transitioning in '87, but circumstances conspired to stop this... I say easier and harder. It was easier, because I had a "label" to hang on what was inside me, and understood that it didn't mean I was crazy. On the other hand, it was harder because I knew I wasn't being true to myself. This later took a toll on my health.

I don't mind you opening a discussion on the topic, but, as others have pointed out, I think that your use of a single "spectrum" is both simplistic and terminally flawed.

Annette

We are all individuals!

I don't think that there is any reason to try to cathegorize what is highly individual and even (in time) changing activity. It can start as a hobby or sexual gratification (but doesn't have to) and it can lead to who knows where. Personally I simply started crossdressing in my mom's clothes and yes masturbation was a part of it. But I did imagine that I am a princess etc. (depending on the clothes) and I even did some gymnastics following a TV-program. Later I discovered that I like to be a child when I dress up - so I discovered the world of adult babies. Which I now am.

Also there can be a difference between what one is and what one would hope to be. If there really where a device to turn me into a complete woman that could have babies (and would help me to loose a lot of years on the side...), I would take it. Otherwise it is incomplete for me - not to mention that socially I am not ready and perhaps doesn't even want to transition via surgery.

This happened to me for reasons I really don't understand. Good old doctor Freud would say that it started in childhood (well it did) and propably has something to do with my relations with my mother. But who cares? The only reason to care and even to cathegorize is when you no longer can function in the society because of what you are doing. In that case the doctors will happily give you a label (hopefully a correct one without being simply judgemental).

But in which cathegory do I fit?

Hugs,
Sissy Baby Paula and Snowball (my toy puppy)

Oversimplified

Sorry, Dorothy, but your four tier classification is no use at all and I cannot give your essay a vote. I cannot make it sweeter by being soft or using waffle or weasel words about it, either.

The picture in reality is more like a three dimensional tree, with many different branches, some growing to great heights and others stumpy and low. The whole range and variety of human gender, sexuality, and desire to dress differently, cannot be so simply described as you have tried to do. One also has to take into account, First the physical state of the individual (physically, gender is not a one or another matter, like either male or female, everyone has a bit of both and we range from almost 90% male to almost 90% female, with nearly everyone somewhere between in a spectrum or continuum. Then you have to look at the Brain Sex of the individual, which can be unifocal or bifocal or even multifocal. After this you have to look at the society in which the individual is living. For a great many years, in Western European societies, the Males were the peacocks, the females dressed drably to hide their bodies and be un-noticeable. Only in more recent times has this reversed.

In other societies in the world today, there are differences in how the sexes dress - Arabian women hide all their bodies, their men let their faces and hands be seen, but the Taureg in N Africa do that the other way round!

The lovely ladies of Namibia go to the supermarket, topless. In their culture you proudly expose your breasts as a young girl so that potential suitors can see how large your nipples and ariolae are, because if they are big it signals that you will be better able to nurture your babies.

In New Guinea, not only do the sexes go mostly naked, the males decorate their penises with brightly painted sheaths! These are suppose to make the young ladies swoon, as well as demonstrate your prowess as a hunter.

One should beware of drawing up hypotheses about classifying human sexuality and gender, based upon an aquaintance with only one's own society and era.

Briar

Hey! Everyone lighten up!

She clearly SAID: "In my opinion!" She's as entitled to that opinion as the rest of us are entitled to ours, but to respond with what, to me, amounts to hostility, is to deny her her opinions.

She might have missed the mark here and there, but all of you were 'kind' enough to call her attention to her 'glaring' errors, and I'm sure she learned from it... as did I.

Don't bother to post your opinions. You'll get dragged across the coals and called uneducated or ignorant. That's what I learned.

Catherine Linda Michel

As a T-woman, I do have a Y chromosome... it's just in cursive, pink script.

It's complex...

As others have stated, trying to squeeze everything onto a one dimension scale is gross oversimplification.
Even three dimensions aren't necessarily enough.

Contributory factors can include:
Genotype (XX, XY, XXY, X0 etc.)
Phenotype (physical appearance)
"Brain gender" (or self-perceived gender identity)
Other body preferences (e.g. hair style/colour, nail style/colour, beard/no beard, pierced/non-pierced)
Clothing preferences (masculine / feminine / androgynous - possibly multi-dimensional in itself)
Clothing preferences (style - definitely multi-dimensional)
And almost certainly many more!

But crucially, most people (even those who wouldn't dare wearing anything remotely associated with the 'opposite' gender) could probably plot multiple points on a graph containing those factors. So you could probably also add in to each collection of points:
Public/private (i.e. how comfortable you are going out in public in any particular combination)
Frequency (i.e. how often do you use a particular combination)

Needless to say, each dimension on this increasingly complex multi-dimensional non-Euclidian graph is a continuous scale, rather than comprised of a set number of discrete points. And I doubt, even if such a graph could be drawn for an individual, anyone would share the exact same spread of data points. We're all unique individuals, and while we may be able to show / demonstrate / talk about a subset of our points, to try and fit any individual on any meaningful fixed scale would be an exercise in pointlessness / impossibility.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...

As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!

To comment or not to comment.

Oh my! I so wanted to comment on this, but it seems if I do, I'll end up in a hornet's nest.

Actually, what I wanted to say is that I don't really fit in any of the categories listed. If I want to label myself, and BTW I'm the only one who can, I choose androgyne, having equal or nearly equal parts of feminine and masculine. It took years of exploring my "unusual" desire to wear feminine things while possessing a male body to come to conclusion that this "thing" what ever it was wasn't going away and I'd better come to terms with it. Strangely enough, I never felt the guilt that so many deal with. That in itself was something to explore.

It wasn't until I was married and my wife caught me all dressed in her clothes that I was forced to explore all of that. Until then I considered myself a normal male who dallied in feminine expression now and then. I only purged once and that could hardly be called purging since I just moved away from a handful of panties, a slip, two bras, one ugly dress and a pair of shoes that didn't really fit when I got married. I was sure I'd never need them again.

Well, in the ensuing years, I've thrown out all my male underwear, let my hair grow beyond my shoulders, I wear a bra with breast forms in (nearly b days, full b evenings and nights) and can't wait to change my outer wear to feminine when I get home from work. Is that normal? I don't know and why should I care? It's me, it's how I am and I'm happy with it.

If you're really interested, I wrote a piece on my transgendered life: See "Silence is Golden."

Hugs
Patricia
([email protected])
http://members.tripod.com/~Patricia_Marie/index.html

Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper ubi femininus sub ubi

Hugs
Patricia

Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann

There are IMHO, too many variables and variations

A Nice ride around Manchester to finish off the Sparkle weekend.

accross the transgender spectrum to create little boxes to catagorise transexuality and transgenderism. In your five catagories I can see bits of me in all of them but worse still the condition can be very fluid and an individual can be at point A or point B at some times then at other points at other times right through perhaps to Z...
I have certainly moved from a simple transvestite with bondage tendancies when aged 4 to 10 to a partial transexual now aged 65. If I had been free of all obligations in my thirties I might have thrown caution to the wind and gone for 'the op' but now on looking back it might have done me more damage than good. I would probably have become a lesbian without a womb.

In some ways I envy those of us who are in little or no doubt about their sexuality and gender for they can at least see a light at the end of whatever tunnel they may be in.

These days my LATEOTH (Light at the end of the tunnel,)appears to be nothing more than a flickering glimmer of uncertainty and I now think it will remain that way until they throw my body away.

Because of this raging uncertainty I am loath to adjudge others for the only certainty I have is that my personal gender and sexuality can be fluid.

Who am I to judge?

Hugs.

OXOXOX.