A Discussion To Get Us Thinking
Okay so I get up early this morning because I have somewhere I need to go. Coffee, pork pie (healthy breakfast!), shave and off I go. Turns out I decided to get so utterly lost that it wasn't even funny so I gave up and came home. :doh:
Anyway, with all this driving round aimlessly listening to The Murderdolls, my brain started wandering down new paths and so I decided to jot down some thoughts here to kickstart a discussion.
Why is it that society seems to have an issue (sometimes) with crossdressers? This is the thought that was running through my head as I was driving round. Is it perhaps because society generally sees crossdressing as something sexual in nature, some kind of fetish or perversion? And basically while to a degree, society accepts that such things go on behind closed doors, they don't want it in their faces and in public places.
Now, assuming that my conjecture is true, does this not suddenly explain why some people are trying to play the "sexual predator" card in this ongoing public toilet issue in the States and elsewhere?
Of course there are many people who enjoy crossdressing as a form of sexual fetish and okay, good luck to them. And for the most part I am assuming that those people keep themselves to themselves and don't walk down the street in their fetishistic clothing. I may be mistaken, I'm making an assumption I know.
Now there are many people (like myself) who just wear everyday clothes you walk past a thousand times a day. We're not parading a sexual fetish in the faces of others, we're just being ourselves. But is it possible that the general public's impression of crossdressing is that of a sexual fetish? If we consider that then doesn't it suddenly make sense that they would have difficulty accepting it in many cases? I mean in their viewpoint, it's no different to seeing someone in their BDSM gear shopping in Tesco for example.
So, is it possible that one of the problems we have is that transgender issues are all lumped together when in fact they are entirely separate and should be viewed as such? I mean, take this forum as an example. It covers a broad spectrum of related issues and yet there are whole swathes of it which bear absolutely no relationship to my own experiences/situation whatsoever. Consider this. Yesterday I officially came out to a friend of mine (he'd already guessed anyway) which is a long story in itself but he was absolutely fine about it and we had a good discussion and he's even given me some information that could be helpful but that's for another thread and time. But let's say that I'd come out to him and he'd said "hey, I don't know much about that and so I'll do some research". He comes to this forum, creates an account as the friend of a TG and walks straight into countless threads about what colour panties you're wearing. That's not the entire forum of course, I appreciate that but it would be easy for someone coming here and to other forums/websites to find out more to jump to the wrong conclusions and then act on those in the real world.
(Incidentally, please don't think of the above as criticism of this forum because it's not intended to be; I'm just illustrating a point).
I mean I remember when I first told my recent girlfriend about being TG and she initially assumed I meant some kind of PVC fetish crossdressing. It was only when I showed her my wardrobes the next day that she was saying "But this is just normal stuff, why would anyone have a problem with that? Incidentally I'm stealing these boots and this top!"
So, in a roundabout way, what I'm getting to is this thought. If we want to be generally more accepted, do we need to show the general public that while there are sexual fetishist crossdressers, the chances of them being out in public are quite small and that the ones who are out and about are just everyday people doing everyday things?
Discuss.
/me prepares for potentially heated debate :argue: