How did you know it was taboo?

[Stephanie Kay]

Hi girls,

I was thinking about when I was young and started to crossdress. I remember being guilty and ashamed right from the start. I don't know why that was. I was never caught and nobody ever took me aside and told me it was wrong or unnatural for a boy to wear girl's clothes. I just felt sooo wonderful dressing up!! So why did I feel so "bad" doing it?? I'm still puzzled by this!!! How/Where did you learn that it was taboo to wear pretty, feminine clothes?

Love,
Stephanie

[rickie121x]

No one ever addressed the notion that it specifically was taboo... somehow I just accepted a socialized dictum that it was so. Crossdressing was laughed at as humorous in movies, ridiculed in jokes, and derided in myriad man-to-man and boy-to-boy comments. So there I was, stuck in that colored environment.

And it stays in my mind, all of the time - except when I am alone, and making up in front of my mirror. In those moments, I am not aware of being "bad".

"Bad", inappropriate, unwanted, less-than, a lot of unspecific fears, those are what are in my mind when it is time for me to step out of my car.... A non-specific dictum, an unspoken rule, that "they" have laid out, and I seem to be unable to escape.

[DonnaT]

Seems I just knew boys didn't wear girly things. I don't recall anyone saying it was taboo, however.

But I've never felt guilty for doing so. I would have been embarrassed had I been caught, but that was part of the thrill too.

[JoAnne Wheeler]

I don't know Stephanie - that is a really good thread. I guess that when I

was little, I was told that this is what boys wear and this is what girls wear

and never the two shall cross. I remember when I tried on my first article

of female clothing, some how I felt that it wrong and had to be done in

secret. It is really screwy because I firmly believe that I was born this way

and that my nurture had nothing to do with it.

JoAnne Wheeler

[ChibiKaiju]

Cuz my dad would get angry if I took a sharpie to my nails, or spent more attention on my hair beyond cutting it.
Really though, I'm not sure cuz I remember also playing with dolls as a kid (Strawberry Shortcake lol)

[Shikyo]

I never did, in fact I still do not know it. Through out my life I've always done things the way I wanted, even in my child hood. I wore the clothes I wanted to, I behaved the way I wanted to. If someone said it was not good for me to behave like that, I did not care. My step mother tried for the longest, she could never stand my long nails, but in the end even she gave up.

[cindym5_04]

I knew it was wrong when in 6th grade I wanted to dress like a girl for halloween (my other guy friends were doing it) and my mom proceeded to go off about how it's wrong. After I got upset and all, she did dress me, but in a totally horrible outfit that I think was more to just embarrass me. I wanted to be a girl, not look like an old lady.

Odd though- this is the same woman that got me Ken dolls so that I could play Barbies with my sister...

[deja true]

Yeah! Rickie's experience is my own. Never caught, never lectured, never had it said that "this is wrong", but knew it was wrong anyway.

The not so subtle messages of the media, like the obvious and humiliating behaviour of dragged out commedians like Berle and Flip Wilson, who portrayed women as objects of derision did it in part.

And the also not so subtle, sarcastic remarks of peers like "you throw like a girl...join the sissies over at net ball!" did a part, too.

This kind of ingrained, sexist, cultural thinking would make any boy think that wanting to be a girl, or even just emulate a girl, aware of how screwed up and perverse he was.

Oh, we knew alright. Nobody had to tell us. The world told us every freekin' day that girl stuff and girl thinking was substandard and a big step down in life.

(Ooops! sorry about the rant!) :)

[susan2010]

That is a really good question. If I remember correctly, the first time was when I was 4 or 5. I must have known it was wrong, because I snuck into my sister's room when everyone but mom was away, and put on her petticoat. She later caught me once. She questioned me a bit, but I didn't really answer, so she left it at "don't do it again".

[Sarah...]

I didn't think it was "taboo" (or "wrong" in five-year-old language) until a school teacher told me. Even then, back in the seventies, there were assessments of kids through school work and I remember being told by a teacher what clothes I should wear as a "boy" and what "interests" I should have. It all felt very strange as I felt the opposite way. It all came about because I answered some questions "wrong" in a test.

Bloody educationalists!!!!

Sarah...

[Lisa Golightly]

A smack around the head. (Honest answer.)

[PanteeQueen]

From Dad. The minute my mother's lingerie went missing, us older boys were grounded for the rest of the summer in our rooms (happened on the second day of summer) until a. the missing lingerie was found and b. the person admitted to it. The lingerie was found and none of us admitted to it. I didn't do it at first, but then I thought if I got in trouble for it, I might as well do the crime. After the missing lingerie was found, we were told that if it happened again we would be force to spend an entire day infront of our parents in what was missing. Not really what you expect to hear when you are 14-15 and going through the awkward stage of life and having really no friends to confide in because you have just moved. My brother who did do it just recently came out that he is gay to our relief. Anyways, that is my storee.

[RobynP]

How/Where did you learn that it was taboo to wear pretty, feminine clothes?

Love,
Stephanie

Stephanie,

Interesting question! I remember when I first started crossdressing not so much that it was "taboo" but basically not what other boys did... When I was in high school and college I used to spend a lot of my time in libraries trying to find and read anything about crossdressing. Unfortunately, most of the information I found was in the "Abnormal Psychology" section of medical books. :sad: This was way before the Internet and before the availability of all of the information available today (but after the invention of the printing press...)

Seeing crossdressing (or transvestism) as "Abnormal Psychology" really freaked me out and drove me very deep into my closet for quite a few years. There wasn't anyone I could talk to about it back then and I definitely could not go to a therapist.

Robyn P.

[Marshchild]

Hi girls,

I just felt sooo wonderful dressing up!! So why did I feel so "bad" doing it??

As the old line goes, "How can it be bad when it feels so good?!" Sorry, I couldn't resist. :heehee: To address your question, though, I'm not sure if I ever really did regard CDing as taboo in my own case. I must have, at least a bit, though, because I once remember fantasizing over a beautiful silver dress a (deliciously evil) female character on a Doctor Who serial was wearing once, and imagining myself wearing it myself; yet at the same time, feeling it was very important that "my" dress was a "male" version of hers (though I could never really work out how I could make it so). At any rate, whatever misgivings I may have had about CDing went out the window during my early teens when I saw another silver dress in the window of a boutique, thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and decided that society's taboo against guys wearing girls' stuff could go to hell - I wanted that dress! (Of course, I was way too poor back then to afford it.) Similarly, a few years earlier, I'd found myself questioning society's taboos concerning sex and excretion, wondering how it was that a couple of perfectly natural bodily functions could be "bad". I found myself unable to come up with a satisfactory answer to that, and was actually quite disappointed - using words like s**t and f**k never seemed to have quite the same thrill after that that they'd always had before! :sad:


Crossdressing was laughed at as humorous in movies, ridiculed in jokes, and derided in myriad man-to-man and boy-to-boy comments. So there I was, stuck in that colored environment.

Every time I see CDing being sniggered at in the media by men, I'm always bemused and feel like I'm getting the last laugh myself. "Yeah," I think, "you might think people like me are pitiable freaks, but at least I have the GUTS and the FREEDOM to wear what I want, and not have to force myself to be content with the relatively narrow range of clothing choices society permits our sex to have." (A T-shirt I once saw summed up my feelings in this regard perfectly with the message: "You laugh at me because I'm different. I laugh at you because you're all the same.") Seriously, though, I never cease to be amazed at how hard a lot of people seem to fight to keep in place restrictions and limitations that ultimately hurt only them. I don't know. People are stupid sometimes.


I knew it was wrong when in 6th grade I wanted to dress like a girl for halloween (my other guy friends were doing it) and my mom proceeded to go off about how it's wrong. After I got upset and all, she did dress me, but in a totally horrible outfit that I think was more to just embarrass me. I wanted to be a girl, not look like an old lady.

Odd though- this is the same woman that got me Ken dolls so that I could play Barbies with my sister...

When I was in my final year of school, we had some lame fancy dress party to which I wanted to go dressed in either something "Satanic" (because for quite a while beforehand, I'd created this image of myself as some big, bad devil-worshipper), or women's clothing. My mother forbade me from wearing either thing, however, mainly because my alleged "Satanism" had already gotten me into a lot of trouble at school (a Catholic one), and she felt that me turning up to a school function in "drag" might do the same thing. So in the end, I was forced to hire a costume at the last minute, and go as Henry VIII. On the plus side, this costume at least allowed me to wear a skirt and tights; on the minus side, I found it pretty lame, not least because it was something I'd merely hired, not had the satisfaction of putting together myself. I was understandably peed off to see a lot of the other boys at the event wearing girls' clothes (often their female classmates' uniforms), and when I ranted to my mother about this afterwards, she conceded that, had she known it would've been OK, she would've lent me a period costume she'd had made for herself a few years earlier (when it was my state's 150th jubilee).

Re your last point, my parents too seemed to send out some mixed messages when it came to "cross-gender" behaviour. They had no problems with me wearing pink, reading women's magazines, or crying (within reason), and even encouraged me to smile a lot more (something else that's arguably "feminine"); yet there were a lot of other girly things I did that they didn't approve of at all.


Stephanie,

Interesting question! I remember when I first started crossdressing not so much that it was "taboo" but basically not what other boys did... When I was in high school and college I used to spend a lot of my time in libraries trying to find and read anything about crossdressing. Unfortunately, most of the information I found was in the "Abnormal Psychology" section of medical books. :sad: This was way before the Internet and before the availability of all of the information available today (but after the invention of the printing press...)

Seeing crossdressing (or transvestism) as "Abnormal Psychology" really freaked me out and drove me very deep into my closet for quite a few years. There wasn't anyone I could talk to about it back then and I definitely could not go to a therapist.

Robyn P.

Yeah, I used to check out what they had to say about transvestism in the Abnormal Psychology sections of a lot of psychology textbooks, and found it all pretty depressing myself (not to mention confusing, as a lot of the doom and gloom they preached about the activity didn't seem to square with my own experiences of it at all). I sometimes swear that a lot of those books decreed that any guy was mentally ill if he didn't aspire to live the life of "the man in the gray flannel suit".

[Karren H]

Simple... If it feels good then it's wrong!!! lol

[Annemarie]

Don't remember anybody saying it is taboo, you just "absorb" the notion from your environment, like the unwritten rule that it is.

[darla_g]

Simple... If it feels good then it's wrong!!! lol
so true

[Carly D.]

I can't tell when I knew it was wrong or why I felt it was wrong either.. I don't remember ever being caught and told don't ever do that again.. I think I was sneaky about it from the beginning as well most likely because I liked the way it felt and I didn't want to be caught and told I couldn't do that anymore.. I'm not sure if that would have stopped me..

[Babette]

It was simple to perceive how cross dressing would fit into my childhood. Girls were taught to act different from boys. Boys were indoctrinated with a Spartan-like philosophy from start. They were to be tough, non-emotional, competitive, or in short macho. We were expected to be lions ready to devour the weak. It was "eat or be eaten alive" by family and peer pressure. Cross dressing was the ultimate taboo that would have made any boy look like a desert for the other lions.

Babette