Crossdressing Domino Effect

[lingerieLiz]

While I understand the domino effect not all of us go on the continuum. When I grew up I thought I must be gay because I was told that guys who dressed in women's clothes were gay and wanted to be women.

As I progressed in CDing I realized that I was not gay and did not want to be a woman. While I enjoyed the femininity and enjoyed passing I also enjoyed my male role with women. I found that I didn't want to be with a guy even when offered the role of a full time house wife. Yes it was fun to go out as a guy's date and be treated as a girl, but there just was no sexual connection.

Sex and sexual orientation are just to complex to be defined in labels.

[DebbieL]

I've been reading "True Selves: Understanding Transsexuality" on my Kindle and it felt like someone had been snooping into my personal life in extreme detail, even things going on in my head. There were hundreds of correlations between this book and my book "Debbie's Secret Life" - including the extreme measures used to maintain a masculine "facade".

Even today, if I won the lottery or someone could do a magic spell in which I become a full fledged attractive young woman, I'd go for it in a heartbeat. It's something I've wished for since I was 5 years old.

The thing is, in my second grade class, there were at least 3 other sissies who were very much like me. Of my 25 cousins, I know that at least two others were transgendered.

Transgendered has deliberately been used and is used legally to describe the broadest possible spectrum of behavior that crosses traditional gender boundaries. This includes everything from post-op transsexuals to gender-queers or men who seem effeminate or women who seem masculine.

One aspect of the transsexual and transgender phenomenon is the concept of "Deep Stealth". Just recently, there was a movie about people who were Soviet Union Spies who were under "Deep Cover". They had grown up for years, since childhood, knowing that their sole purpose for existence was to do the bidding of their Soviet handlers when the time came, but in every other way they had to live, act, and appear to be naturalized Americans.

The transsexual and transgender often has this experience. They know as young as 4-5 years old that they want to be the other gender (MtF or FtM). They wish for it, they pray for it, they hope that they will somehow avoid puberty and/or puberty will turn them into the desired gender. Even when they understand the realities of puberty, they STILL want to be the other sex. At the same time, by 5-6 years old, they have learned that they must keep their desire a secret, that they can't tell ANYONE. They are afraid the bullies at school will beat them up, that their parents will beat them, or worse, kick them out of the house. They literally fear for their lives, knowing what they are and actually believing that someone would literally KILL them if they didn't keep their transgender desires a secret.

So if 1 in 10 boys were sissies at 5, why are there only 1 in 30,000 who get gender reassignment? How many "Sissies" are in "deep stealth mode". Post-op transsexuals often ALSO go into deep stealth mode after SRS. If 1 in 10 people were transgendered as children, how many would that be - about 20 million?

We know that Transgenders have very high suicide rates - let's assume that half kill themselves - that would leave about 10 million. Of those, 90% go into "Deep Stealth" mode, leaving about 1 million as "Out" transgenders. But of those who are "out" many would be out as Cross-Dressers, Transvestites, Fetish dressers, or "Drag Queens".

Now, out of the 1 million left, let's assume that 90% of those are resigned to the fact that their bodies could not be transformed, even with HRT, FFS, and SRS. They would need major reconstructive surgery just to look passable as "old ladies".

This leaves about 300,000 out of 300 million men and women in the USA who could be officially classified as transsexuals.

The question is; "If Transgenders and Transsexuals were fully accepted and integrated into our culture, how many would there be?".
If one considers that there may be 30 MILLION Men and Women who are transgendered in some form, knew that they could be accepted - this would be the real number.

[sometimes_miss]

It doesn't matter how militant and upset you get, in big groups like this you do not need to out yourself destructively.
Tact is the better part of valor in this case.

^this. Like going out in public 'just because we have to get people more used to how many crossdressers there really are', we shouldn't have to take on more problems than we are ready to deal with just because someone else thinks its a good idea. Me? I 'got' the domino effect way back when I was what, 13? First time I saw another student being treated like the outcast in a class like I had been. Made me realize that no one should have to go through this just because they have something different about them.

[Jaymees22]

I don't know if it's a domino effect or more of a snowball effect. Several here say it started out small and then worked up to full dressing. I guess I'm the exception to that rule, I envisioned myself fully dressed then I purchased the things I needed in one big pink fog of a day and put them on and found myself relieved of all my stress in that moment. Now I've spent the last 8 months improving my style and hopefully getting better at it everyday. I feel better now than I've ever felt...Jaymee

[Thea Pauline]

I agree the number of people that would be considered 'transgendered' would be phenomenal if truly known. However, that assumes the definition stands in light of the current 'bipolar' definition of gender. If we were to assume people could express gender as they felt it to be true, for them as individuals... I think the whole concept of transgender would disappear. Do we not define 'gay' as sexual preference and 'transgender' as mental/physical expression of feeling?

Perhaps this is why the LGB in LGBT disowns the transgender experience...