My activity on this forum is a lot less frequent than it used to be, and a big reason for that is because I'm so active and open in my personal life these days that I haven't had as much of a need for the safe space as I did when I was still closeted and then fresh from the closet.
Nowadays I tend to express most of my writing about gender and such on my tumblr blog (and twice now on the Huffington Post!), and one thing that I have come across a few times is when people wanting to identify crossdresser as simply being cis gendered men who like to wear dresses. It sort of irks me a but whenever I come across this attitude because I remember from my more active days here, the response I usually got from how *I* presented was that it was far too overtly male for many of your tastes. I remember getting really frustrated at times when I'd hear my style described as "halfway" dressing. I felt like I was always dressing all the way... like myself. Based on that experience though it seems to me that people who self-identify as cross dressers don't just see ourselves as men in dresses because if that were the case then why the insistence towards dressing to present as a woman, outside of the safety issues, which I don't think is the primary motivation for most.
But since in the last several years I've moved away from using the term cross dresser to define myself, and I don't want to speak for other people, I'm legitimately curious: Do you think of yourself as transgender or do you think you fully identify as a man, and the cross dressing isn't about your gender identity but more the clothes than anything?
