Help, I'm overdosed on TV newsletters, magazines books and handouts. Life has been busy of late, and just about everything I found in the PO box has gotten tossed into a pile at the back of the closet, waiting time to read it. So the holiday weekend came and I had time to dress up, lay back and read. I read it all at first, then found myself skipping around a bit, then jumping over whole articles on the title alone. After the fifth report of how the convention went, fourteenth discussion on how to tell the wife/kids/parents/mailman, the twenty-eighth personal history and umpteenth argument about what word we should use to identify which gradation of a man in woman's clothes, something snapped and I ran screaming from the room with skirt flying.

Anxious to restore my grip on reality, however tenuous, I made lunch and sat down with the latest issue of The Skeptical Inquirer for a good dose of common sense. Perhaps you are not familiar with the Skeptical movement, I fear most people aren't. SI is the journal of The Committee for Scientific Investigation for Claims Of the Paranormal, a name begging for an acronym if I ever heard one. CSICOP. Say it out loud, phonetically. Psi cop. I don't know if it was intentional, but it works.

As I began to think of it, a crossdresser has to be skeptical to survive. There are so many pathways to fantasy in our world it's hard to keep things straight.

So what is a Skeptic with a capital 'S'? Simply stated a Skeptic is one who demands that any claim to anything be backed up with proof, and that any extraordinary claim (UFOs, miracle healings, ESP, etc.) be backed with rigorous proofs before being accepted. Simple to state, sure, like "a crossdresser wears the clothes of the opposite sex", but as complex in reality as the ins and outs of TV/TS behavior. This need of extraordinary proof of extraordinary claims applies to crossdressing in the minds of most people. Like it our not our society is irrational on the subject of sex, and crossdressing is automatically lumped in the "perverted sex" category without thought. Education has helped, but we still need to present that extraordinary proof to the outside world.

This skeptic has had trouble swallowing some of the ads I've found in TV/TS publications. Then I read an article about your personal colors, or the way to make yourself up, and find the opposite advice in an article from another source. And pardon me if I say that you needn't be a Skeptic to gag at most of the TV fiction available.

You had better be a skeptic about your appearance before going out in public. One of the first rules of skepticism is your personal involvement will bias your judgment. If you don't have an unbiased outside opinion before you leave, there is someone out there that will be glad to inform you about all your mistakes, believe me. Then there's all the psychological advice available. Tell the kids, don't tell the kids, how to break the news, CDs are special, this survey says one thing, the next says something else. How the devil do you sort it out.

I can't tell you that is a sentence, but what I can tell you is that after reading SI for a few years, I have painlessly gained the tools to sort the sense from the nonsense. The interplay of claim, response, counterclaim, on such diverse subjects and animal intelligence, medical quackery, the effects of heavy metal rock, crystals and other new age trappings begins to teach you what questions to ask. then in the next issue the letters column challenges what was in the last issue. One of the things I find most interesting are the accounts of 'classic' frauds of the past.' By knowing what has happened before, you are less likely to be fooled in the future.

For those of our sisters involved in educating the public, the same techniques used to counter false claims of the paranormal apply to countering false information about crossdressing. I know this column has strayed from crossdressing, but we can't stay dressed all our life. You might pay a visit to you local library and check out a copy or two of SI. If you want to go whole hog, get a subscription from The Skeptical Inquirer. After all, its something to read until the next issue of Cross Talk gets there.

(Note: This was written for the now defunct Cross Talk Magazine.)