TransPersonal #7

When Sex Is A Drag, Part 2

When Sex Is A Drag
Part II: Lipstick and Testosterone: The Boudoirs of Male-To-Female Cross-Dressers
Originally published in Scarlet Letters, January 2004.

I once listened to a friend of mine interviewing a male cross-dresser and his wife about how their relationship had survived once the husband came out about his habit of many years: dressing up as female, often in her clothing while she was gone. They both spoke movingly about acceptance, and learning to get over stereotypes, and finding that love really does conquer all, especially with the help of some wives-of-TVs support groups. They talked about how he was easier to live with now that he was "in touch with his female side", not to mention the heightened level of honesty in their relationship now that he wasn't lying to her on a regular basis. The wife of the couple, holding her husband's manicured hand as Wayne - now transformed into Linda - beamed at the interviewer, hesitantly admitted that it had taken her a long time to get to the point where she could accept it as not possibly ruining her marriage.

Up until this moment, it had all been very compelling, and very sweet, but my friend the interviewer had to throw what she thought would be a political curve ball into it. "If you'd been a man in the 1920's," she challenged the wife, "and your wife wanted to wear pants, and you wouldn't let her, don't you see how it would be a kind of oppression? What's the difference between that and your husband wanting to wear a skirt?"

"Because it's sexual," the wife said, without missing a beat.

My friend was caught entirely off guard. "What....what do you mean?"

"It's sexual," the gray-haired, middle-aged woman repeated. "The woman in the 1920's who wanted to wear pants didn't put them on, go off into the bedroom, lock the door, masturbate in her trousers, and then not have anything left for the marriage bed."

The interviewer was flummoxed, and didn't know quite how to follow up that line of reasoning. "Uh....how do you manage that?" she asked.

By this time, Linda was no longer beaming. She was sitting with a frozen expression on her face, carefully not looking at anyone. She unobtrusively drew her hand from her wife's grasp to adjust her wig, and didn't put it back. The tension in the room tripled. Linda's wife continued doggedly, looking the interviewer straight in the eye, "That was the hardest part. It wasn't just that he wanted to dress up for psychological reasons, it was that dressing up made him aroused in a way that I couldn't compete with. There was lots of masturbation involved....lots of it."

"Couldn't you figure out a way to integrate it into your sex life?" my friend asked.

"Well, we sort of tried that," the woman said slowly, "although there is a big problem in that I'm not attracted to Linda, I'm a normal heterosexual woman and I'm attracted to Wayne, the man I married. But I could probably have gone along with it except that even when I was involved sexually, if there were women's clothes involved as well, they were the star of the show, and not me. I was a bit player, there to help with the hardware." She looked ingenuously into the interviewer's eyes, apparently unaware of her accidental pun. "So now we have a rule that he can cross-dress, but he can't masturbate more than once a week."

"And how do you feel about this, Linda?" the interviewer asked in a what-the-hell kind of voice.

Linda smiled weakly. "I, ah, I love my wife, and I have to have something left, you know, for in bed. My wife's been really accepting, I have to give a little too." She didn't meet anyone's eyes, and the interviewer decided to change the subject. I sat there for the next half hour watching them discuss tamer subjects, and all I could wonder was: when he makes love to his wife, does he imagine that he's wearing pantyhose and a teddy? Are the other nonsexual reasons for cross- dressing enough, or did removing the sexual aspect leave an empty space that will eventually need to be fulfilled, causing this person to violate this agreement? Is s/he still secretly jerking off in satin panties even now? Is s/he wondering if this was a devil's bargain - acceptance in the home at the price of his fetish?

I'll probably never know, and I felt a good deal of compassion for him, because at the time I was living as female and was a female fetishistic cross-dresser (a phenomenon that will be discussed in the next installment of TransPersonal). I knew what it was like to get turned on by dressing and acting like the sex you weren't currently assigned to, I knew what it was like to want to incorporate that into your sex life....and through my various escapades in the lesbian community, I knew what it was like to have partners be horrified when you brought it into the bedroom. I also knew that I had utterly failed to eradicate it in myself, and I had to resort to the most practical and cold-hearted solution: date no one who can't deal with your kink.

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The majority of male-bodied people who identify as cross-dressers are heterosexual; some are bisexual, but the ones who prefer men all seem to embrace the drag queen label, perhaps because they actually have a public outlet for people to appreciate their costuming. For the purposes of this article I'm going to limit the terms "fetishistic cross-dresser" or "fetishistic transvestite" to those people who are fetishizing the "look" of being the opposite sex, including clothing and behavior. I'm not currently including those whose fetish is simply about certain specific articles of clothing, such as panties or pantyhose or lingerie, as that's more of an object- oriented fetish akin to getting off on rubber or cigarettes or shoes. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; it's just a different type of fetish that deserves its own space.) I'm also dealing with female-to-male fetishistic cross-dressers in the next article, as they deserve a whole article of their own.

There's a hierarchy of perversion in the gender community as a whole, and fetishistic cross-dressers are at the bottom of it. The majority of cross-dressers - at least the ones who are "out" enough to come to CD/TV support groups and/or events - downplay the sexual aspect for that reason. According to them, they're driven to cross-dress for other reasons: they want to get in touch with their inner female, they like beautiful clothing and men's clothing in this culture is ugly and boring, they're theatrical and like to create personas, they're bending gender for political reasons. In some cases, they've always felt like women internally to some extent, and they're experimenting with the idea of sex reassignment.

These are all very well and good, and I support them wholeheartedly. However, it bothers me to simultaneously hear CDs fall all over themselves to deny any sexual aspect to their crossdressing, and see so many of them dressing up in highly sexual ways. If there's nothing sexual about it, why the red minidress or the black leather corset? And if there is something sexual about it, what's wrong with that? It's another classic case of sex being devalued by our society, and sexual minorities being hushed to make a larger demographic look acceptable. You can see the same thing in the gay and lesbian communities, where efforts are periodically desperately made to focus on the nonsexual aspects of the lifestyle, downplaying the fact that the main point of being gay or lesbian is because you want someone of the opposite sex in your bed. Much of the perceived "sleaziness" of the bisexual community, if it can be called that, seems on further examination to be about their ongoing inability (or unwillingness) to expunge any emphasis on sex.

But back to the world of cross-dressers. One woman I know divorced her husband of more than a decade when s/he began to dress up as a woman nearly full-time (s/he was working for a gender-oriented business at the time and could afford to do that). I figured that the issue was the cross-dressing - she'd said things to that effect - although I didn't ask at the time because, frankly, it was none of my business. Imagine my surprise when I ran into the same woman at a CD/TV event, with a new flame......who was dressed almost exactly like her. I pulled her aside in utter confusion. "If you're OK with the gender-crossing, why did you divorce N?"

"I don't mind people who are both male and female," she said. "I'm bisexual; that's not a problem. The problem is that N didn't turn into the kind of woman that I like. She became an absolute slut, wanting to dress up like a whore all the time. I'm turned off by that. In my family, where I grew up, it was very sexist and women were judged by their appearances. I was given hell for refusing to cater to that stereotype, for not wanting to be an object. To see N embracing that, with the six-inch heels and the scanty clothing and the bright red lipstick....well, I just couldn't deal with it. She thinks it's fun, but she has no idea what it's like for real women to be pressured into looking like that."

I looked at her and her flame, standing together and holding hands and smiling, both with businesslike chin-length haircuts. One was short and wore a dark-blue knit women's suit with silver buttons; the other was a head taller and wore a maroon knit women's suit with gold buttons. Now I'm always glad when anyone finds love, and I realize that people are turned on to what they're turned on to, but I had to wonder about poor N, trying to get in touch with her inner ho. Maybe she was just getting through her own ambivalence about female sexuality, and couldn't have a clean relationship with it until that was done.

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. Yes, it's brave. You try it and see for yourself.

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.

Whether these women performed gender in this way because they were trying to have a particular effect on men, or whether it was just part of who they are, is debatable and irrelevant to my point. I simply wonder whether part of the reason women are so offended is because it hits home on some level. She may not be a trashy ho, but if all women are supposed to be sisters, then she has to share sisterhood with one somewhere. Men, being outsiders to the female experience, can see the more negative sides of women in general, just as women can do with men. Sometimes it's these questionable, worrisome parts of femaleness that become absorbed close to home and must be dealt with first, just as FTM TVs sometimes start out with personas that are big mean abusive guys, or sissy fags that get beat up. If women are actually going to ever accept each other as sisters, even the sisters who don't act in acceptably 'enlightened' ways, than they need to stop reacting to men's negative female performances as knee-jerk insults. Instead, it would be more educational for them to probe into whether their reaction would be more or less comfortable with a biowoman who acted the exact same way - and, yes, there's always going to be at least one out there, and you probably won't be able to change her by explaining to her how wrong she is - and explore their discomfort with that way of being female in the world.

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Of course, a certain percentage of MTF TVs will actually go further and start changing their bodies and applying for legal femininity. Those who actually transition may find out to their dismay that when you're doing it all the time, it isn't sexy any more. This lends a good bit of credence to the idea that in people who actually should get sex reassignment, the fetish can be a way that the subconscious gets one's attention. After years of repressing all those feelings down the bottom of the mind's basement, the only door they have to get out is to squeeze through the libido....because you can't control your sexual urges. You can decide not to act on them, but they will still be there, rising with every surge of lust. They are the psyche's way of never letting you get away entirely with denial. As long as you must open that door of sexuality, you will never be able to get away from your own unexpressed gender issues.

This doesn't mean that all cross-dressers are (or should attempt to be) transsexuals. Gender dysphoria is a continuum, not a solid, monolithic syndrome, and for some people, acknowledging the female side of their sexuality once in a while is just fine and quite enough, thank you, and that should be respected. But whether or not it confines itself to just one piece of your sexuality, or entirely envelopes your life, it should be respected as a message to your conscious self from your unconscious self that you have deep psychological work that needs to be done around the concept of gender.

There's another reason that contributes to the death of that fetish in post-transition transwomen, and that's the depressing effect that estrogens have on the libido. When the sexual urges themselves are repressed, everything is less sexy in general. For some, it's a relief, especially if their cross-dressing and masturbation had become obsessive; it lets them concentrate on the more psychological aspects of gender transformation without an annoying hard-on in the way, demanding constant attention. For others, it's a problem. One MTF friend of mine went on and off of hormones repeatedly in her attempts to figure herself out. When she was off estrogens, she felt less psychologically comfortable in general, but the idea of being female was her major fetish and was extremely attractive. When she went back on the estrogens, she felt happier and calmer, but her libido dropped and suddenly being feminine wasn't so attractive any more. At that stage, she felt that she might as well be a sexless androgyne.

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There's no easy answer to that dilemma, but not every transwoman has such difficulty with the sex/persona split. Dr. Anne Lawrence, a transwoman who has contributed a great deal to good literature on the inner workings of the transwoman mind, was the first to popularize the word gynemimetophilia - defined as people who eroticize female mimicry - in the transgender community. In her article "Men Trapped In Men's Bodies", she theorized (from personal experience) that a certain percentage of male-to-female transsexuals don't actually have the internal female identity that one needs to claim to have in order to get one's hormones and surgery. Instead, she feels that they are people with male or androgynous internal identities whose need to see themselves erotically as female is so strong that it takes over their whole life, and they might as well transition and be women for all practical purposes. She also claimed that they do just as well after transition as any "classic" transsexual.

She took a lot of heat for her honesty. Angry letters poured in to the magazine that published her article, denouncing her claims. Most of them seemed to be from frightened MTF transsexuals who worried that if any of the gatekeepers in the mental health community heard this revelation, they might assume that all transsexuals are just fetishists, and use it as a reason to deny them hormones and surgery. Yet silencing a portion of any community to make the rest of them look better to outsiders isn't a trick that ever works, or at least not for long. Eventually, they will be speaking up, and that's a good thing, because some of the rules around who gets to have what body have got to change, and they won't change as long as everyone toes the party line.

I'll close with my favorite line from Kate Bornstein, which she uttered as part of her keynote speech at a conference full of cross-dressers. "The rest of the gender community puts you down," she said, "because they say that you're only playing with gender. Well, thank God that someone's playing with gender!"

Yes, let's be grateful that someone's playing with Gender. Because Gender is really, really uptight and desperately needs a good orgasm, preferably in as kinky circumstances as possible.