Earning the right to wear women's clothes

[Stephanie M]

I dress and wear makeup for one simple reason! To express who i am and feel, and that is being a woman.Everyone should wear what they like to wear! and not hide themselves.

Those are wise words. Everyone should be able to dress and appear as how they feel.

[KimberlyS]

..bought a pair of women's stretch blue jeans. Then I washed them and they shrunk.

Hanna, usually it is not the washing that shrinks clothes, often it is the drying. The dryer is very hard on a lot of clothes. I hang dry a lot of clothes or just dry them part way and hang dry them the rest of the way. Clothes do not shrink at or or very little and an added bonus is the clothes look better longer and last longer.

As a side note I love the women stretch jeans. They are most of what I wear for jeans in male mode.

kimberlys cd
joe in a skirt

[Marissa Mae]

Hi sisters,

What a good discussion this is. One of the best recent threads. It's getting at something very hard to define but very basic. Sorry for the length of the following, but I'm struggling to define where our worst trouble is coming from.

I've been thinking about the enormous resistance to our being public and noticeable. It comes primarily from men, I think; probably a larger percentage of women are more tolerant. With the exception of girls "malling," of course.

I don't think we quite realize how visceral, how hard to overcome, the resistance to our CDing and TG/TS in general, can be. I know this feeling because—despite my lifelong desires to be feminine—I once felt it myself.

It's a very real horror, coming from way below the surface, and thus not accessible to rational thought: a horror of the unmasculine man, particularly the feminine man. To see a male "pretending" (as men see it) to be female/feminine is almost intolerable. It hits men at a queasy place many of them can't overcome. Some of our more modern men are overcoming this, or striving to. But the horror of anything subverting masculinity is instinctual, I think. And with some men, it triggers violent action to eradicate the cause of the visceral threat.

Yes, it is a threat. Perhaps the problem for men, traditional males in particular, is that it exposes their own deep-seated insecurities—"am I a man?—nobody better call me a girl—I have to be manly—I must never let any impulse show that might be seen as feminine—guys will laugh at me, shame me, drive me out of the male realm forever—guys will make a sissy out of me—subjugate me—they might rough me up, maybe even kill me if I let my masculinity slip even a little bit—it's the worst thing that could happen to me"—etc. etc.

The more hyper-masculine the man is, the more anxieties he's carrying about being womanlike. The more he has to shut it out. Vomit it up. At worst, he might destroy the offender, if it gets him anxious enough.

So what can we, as people honestly trying to violate the gender line, do about this? I think we're all pretty stumped about it.

My own solution is the craven one. I'm scared to go out there en femme, always have been—yet on the contrary I feel a deep-seated, hard-to-explain excitement about risking it, wearing boobs in public, risking "getting caught," but with tops that are loose enough to create doubt, etc.

I admire those of you who dare the public route. But I think someone made the point above that it's very hard for us to improve matters by going public. I think this is because so few of us can really pull it off, be taken for women, while those who are obviously male or "read" in some way almost work counter to our cause because they provoke this "vomit reflex" in many people.

It's very much like the "uncanny valley" reflex that robotics people speak of: the closer an android gets to looking and acting human, the uglier people's reactions are. As if we've got a super-strong subconscious horror of something that gets too near our instinctual ideas of what a human is, or (in our sense) what a man is, what a woman is. Maybe that response once had survival value, but now it's just a nuisance, almost an evil.

Instinctually, the closer we get to seeming female (but failing), the more we set off all those basic alarm bells. (Though it might be argued—not to push the analogy too far—that our most blatant failures at seeming female ring the bells just as loudly.) Same thing—either way, we're no nearer our goal of acceptance.

How then do we cross the male-female "uncanny valley," since most if not all of us are stuck in that valley? How do we overcome that in-built horror of the "girly-man" as Schwarzenegger so offensively put it?

Ask a harder one, huh? But your answers are what we vitally need.

Love, Marissa Mae

[Victoria K.]

There is no easy solution to this problem.The only answer i see is that you must do what you feel you must do and not worry about what may happen.Setting a example in the hope that in time more will see its just wrong to tear people apart because they are different than you.

[Noeleena]

Hi,
Earning the right of wearing womens clothes ,

I really think this needs to be about being able to express who you are , and who are you trying to be,

Are you real to start with in the first place or hiding who you are, so is this about you wearing some clothes designed for females , so nity grity, do those clothes fit you your body shape , ask that ? and answer truth fully , ....

i doubt they do, why not, shape, body is different , so its not the clothes then is it, they were not made for men, end of.

So what changes for you then if they don't fit, you have to change the shape of your body it fit then in a way that ....LOOKS.... right, so that being the case its more about your body shape not the clothes so if you think about that then your reasoning is very different. padding forms and what ever,

Your really trying to look like a woman, and pass as one and fool others into thinking you are one. and then have our space our own rights that we had to fight for 1890s to 1920,s its coming to we wont have any rights at all like it was before the 1890,s

Okay so put on a dress would that be enough, not from those i talk to and see, and know how they think.

No they wont makeup shoes adornments and the whole nine yards, till they have it all.

Our men from the Islands wear skirts and of so lovely colours and not different from the women our scottish men wear Kilts and have for many 100,s of years and go back further to 1400 s and what men wore then check it out,

so really its not about earning the right to wear womens clothes at all , its far more deep seated than just that.

And really i don't care what men wear or don't its how it impacts us in the long term , we bear the brunt of whats going on toilets changing rooms and other detail now if we as women go in to a womens toilet we are dragged out and done over never had that before did we, we are accussed of being a male in a womans toilet yet we are born females oh no we have to prove beyond any shadow of doubt we are in fact born female, how many case,s has come to light over the last 2 years,

So you see if guys wear our designed clothes for us and you try to fool others into thinking your a woman do you take full responsiblity for being a real woman ,,,no you just change clothes back into male and ....walk away.... like nothing happened. and we wear the flack,

that's whats happened when men wonted their rights to dress like women.

Heres the ? are you going to change this are you going to set right what we as females need so we can have our space back as we fought so hard to gain and now loosing, will you as guys help us or just carry on till we lose all our gained rights .

How far do you really wont to go. and where are you going to stop .

I worked hard in explaining what it like for those of us who are different TVNZ Nation wide 3 Million people Papers the Net, and talking to large groups of people and explaining so much to help others to be accepted and talked to 1000.s more , and was done in a way people would understand ,
I,m in the process of talking to many men and some would be in your term rednecks you know what
I get on so well with these guys had 6 who did not wont to know so from that and the many i have talked to i,m doing very well,and the acceptance is really so lovely , they don't have to , yet they do, i can reach many 10s of 1000s of people , some thing i don't see coming from many on forums i know about and as a member of happeingits all ways about not being accepted,

So i,v layed it out over to yous to think about this and will you change whats going on.

Many say its the males who don't accept others of difference ,, well my story is very different and 80 % are men from the States , and they do, yes some are tough as , yet i,m accepted,

...noeleena...

[Victoria K.]

I won't speak for others but i dress the way i am to reflect who i am.Being transgender is a cruel joke that puts much pain on those who really believe they are opposite to the body parts they were born with.Living the way you feel is not hiding yourself but in reality showing all who you really are.Be happy with the way you are and do not hide yourself.

[Wesley]

Of course there is no hard definition between CD and TG. Many CD's find dressing not enough and start a transition, every partner's fear. For the most part, if I may risk a generalization, a CD may have enough femme time and get on the day as a man (even if underdressed). My guy would rather be a man than woman in many of life's trials. A dark parking garage or alleyway, changing a flat tire, or sex.Eileen

I don't know that I can agree with you here Eileen. I consider myself a crossdresser and NOT transgender. I am a man, I am happy being a man and have no desire to change my sex. What is NOT being mentioned is how crossdressing progresses. Most of us start at adolescence and reinforce our dressing with masturbation and orgasm. We develop a subtle but sure reward system for our crossdressing.

Like any Stimulus==> Reward system, over time, we develop tolerance, just as we do with most any action which leads to a reward into the human brain. After a while, we have to increase the stimulation to achieve the same level of reward. We advance to putting on an item in secret to multiple items, or underdressing, to appearing in public dressed and passing. . .

What happens at this point? Where do you go for more stimulation after the thrill of "Passing" has passed? I would submit, at some point, is where it starts to get "weird." Recently, I posted a link to an article called "7 things you learn as a straight guy who crossdresses" from Cracked magazine. I think he hit on it when he says:

It's about getting to bring out my feminine side every now and then. Part of where it gets weird, even for the dressers ourselves, is learning to differentiate between something feeling sexy and it being sexual. I can put on all this stuff (and it's a lot of stuff, we'll get into that in a moment) and feel incredibly sexy, but it doesn't get me off. It may seem like a fine line, but really, it's the same way that any woman can put on a slinky dress and heels and feel powerfully sexy, but that doesn't mean it gives her a sexual thrill in and of itself. It's a look, not a fetish. . .

What most of us want more than anything is validation of our femininity. . .

The validation that you are feminine and you are enticing is a big pull for most of us, and if we're not getting it from friends, family, or healthy relationships, it's easy to slip into getting it from wherever you can.

- http://www.cracked.com/personal-experie ... esser.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Over time, we internalize that need to validate femininity. We fantasize about being female. We entertain the idea of feminizing, and later HR and SRS. BUT, and here is the important part, we loose part of ourselves in the process. We become overly enamored of ourself in a female body and forget our spouses (or assume they will go along willingly, which rarely happens) We discard more of our manliness for feminine.

It does not happen overnight, it takes years in many cases. But this is how people who crossdress progress to TRANSGENDER. We aspire to be something we can never really be. We idolize the female form to unrealistic expectations and then become depressed when it is denied to us, AS WE PICTURE IT. (Consider the depression rate in transgender and people who have completed SRS.)

Remember, on a base level, if we marry, there was no provision in the marriage license that permitted us to change sex. Our wives married a man. There is an expectation that we will remain as such. Given how fortunate we are to find a woman who tolerates or encourages our crossdressing, expecting same to embrace a sex change is all too often, a bridge too far.

No, I am not a psychologist, these observations come from 40 years of introspection. I suspect a common pathway for adolescent onset crossdressing. I have even flirted with the idea of a boob job myself. Sure the results of HRT would be nice, but I draw the line there. I enjoy having the appropriate parts for the XY package. I enjoy having masculine attributes and that is where I will stay.