Where do I start except at the beginning... I am a 52-year young crossdresser. I have been crossdressing since my early teen years. For a long time I thought I was the only one with this "strange behavior" that I did not share with anyone. During my college years, I spent a lot of time in libraries to find out anything about crossdressing. Unfortunately, at that time, most of the information available was in Abnormal Psychology. My first purge occurred when I got married. I thought that the crossdressing would go away once I was married. It turned out the opposite happened. I was like a kid in a candy store having access to all of my wife's things. I continued my research online when CompuServe and AOL first started. I met several people locally who were also crossdressers. I started to crossdress more and more expanding my wardrobe quite a bit. I did not tell my wife about my crossdressing until many years into the marriage and after two kids. She hated the crossdressing but felt very trapped in the marriage. We tried both joint and individual counseling and my wife grudgingly started to accept the crossdressing in order to preserve the marriage. My crossdressing "escalated" to becoming active in several CD/TG groups and attending both local and national CD/TG conventions. My wife and I divorced after 20 years of marriage. My wife's inner resentment of the crossdressing (even though outwardly she accepted it) drove an irreversible wedge between us. She was slowly withdrawing from me physically and emotionally causing me to find comfort elsewhere...
I have been divorced now for almost nine years and been swimming in the dating pool now for a while. I have had a number of relationships since the divorce, some short, some long. My last relationship lasted for several years and we were seriously talking about marriage. However, the one thing that has caused the breakup of most of my relationships has been the crossdressing.
The women I have dated universally have hated the crossdressing and have broken off the relationship because of it. Sometimes I have told the women within the first couple of dates, others I have waited until later in the relationship. I have tried to be somewhat selective in who I date trying to figure out ahead of time if they open to different lifestyles. For the most part, they all have been open to other lifestyles except when it comes to their boyfriend or potential husband. The women that I have been in longer relationships with, I have given them various information about crossdressing that is available for wives and girlfriends.
In my last relationship, my girlfriend not only hated the crossdressing but also considered it an addiction like alcohol, drugs, or gambling. Not only did she want me to toss out everything to do with crossdressing, she wanted me to seek addiction treatment. Not only did she not want me crossdressing, she did not want me to be a crossdresser.
I have never considered my crossdressing to be an addiction or even an obsessive/compulsive behavior (in the clinical sense). However, her position was that if I could not stop it forever, especially since it was a deal-breaker in our relationship, then I was addicted to it.
I do not crossdress 24/7 nor do I want to. I do not want a sex change. I am not even active in the local CD/TG community anymore. I do not feel the need to crossdress all the time. When I do, my appearance is like a divorced soccer mom.
I feel secure in my manhood. I DO enjoy being a man. There are many other things I would much rather do than to crossdress. However, there are times when something triggers inside of me and the desire to crossdress becomes very strong and difficult to resist. And being single, it has been easy to accommodate the desire. I am not "out" to my kids, my family, or to my co-workers. There is no need for them to know.
If you ask 100 people "Is the Earth flat?" and 99 out of 100 say yes, it does not mean that the Earth IS flat. Those 99 people are wrong. The person asking the question probably was asking the members of the Flat Earth Society...
Therefore, if I ask you "Is crossdressing an addiction or an obsessive/compulsive behavior?" it would not surprise me if 100% say absolutely not. Moreover, there is not a whole lot of scientific research to support or refute the question. If it is, the psychologists and psychiatrists really are not interested in it probably because it is a small group of people or there are many other addictions that are more destructive.
Are we fooling ourselves? How many of us could stop crossdressing today, throw everything out or give it away, and never, ever think another thought about crossdressing? I know that many of us have tried to stop the behavior (some of us many times) but we eventually "fall off the wagon"... Many of us have gone through one or more divorces, lost their jobs, lost important relationships with friends and family because of crossdressing. (And I am not talking about the people who transition.) There are many couples who accommodate the crossdressing with a "Don't ask, Don't tell." agreement. Aren't these all symptoms of an addiction?
Even though the women I have dated do not represent a scientific survey sample, when 100% are not only turned off, but also break off the relationship because of the crossdressing, it tells me something.
Yes, there ARE women out there who can tolerate and accept a crossdressing boyfriend or husband, but I think there are fewer than we would like to think. And the number of women who actively enjoy and encourage their partner's crossdressing is even smaller. How many women ACTIVELY seek a relationship with a crossdresser and who would break off a relationship with a man because he ISN'T a crossdresser? (There are a number of male "tranny chasers" or "admirers". But how many women are "tranny chasers" or "admirers"? Doesn't this strike you as a little strange?)
Anyhow, I have decided to jump out of the dating pool for a while... I need some time off to think about things...
Are we deceiving ourselves about crossdressing? Sure, it's not "normal" but is it addictive? Even though many of us are out in the public and, for the most part, the public doesn't give a hoot about how we look. However, what society in general says about us seems to contradict what many of our girlfriends, potential wives, and wives tell us.
So what is the truth about crossdressing?
--Robyn