It's taken a LONG time

[susan54]

I am in my 60s and have been crossdressing for over 50 years. In the last 20 or so years I have spent more than half my waking hours and almost all my sleeping hours in skirts and dress (or nightdresses). It moved up a gear when I started working a lot from home, and since lockdown I probably haven't spent more than 30-40 hours in male clothes in total. I don't identify as a woman - I just like wearing the clothes and occasionally, when I go out, acting the part. I have been out in public in a dress only once since lockdown, for a whole day with a woman friend. Today is the first time when putting my dress (it is usually a dress not a skirt) and other stuff on this morning seemed like the normal thing to do, even though I have been doing that for many years - even on office days I would wear a dress for breakfast and shaving. Of course today might be a one-off, who knows, but it shows that early life trouser wearing can take a very very long time to be replaced mentally with dress wearing.

[phili]

I came out to my wife 5 years ago, and since then I have been really working on trying to understand what my baseline is, and now 5 years seems like a long time. The difficulty is that my wife continues to object- so it is an atmosphere of suppression. I have found that I am still moving down the river, and these days I spend a few hours each morning dressed and she has to deal with it- but it hasn't been a terrible problem since she takes a long time to wake up and reads the paper for those hours. THen I change and we go out for a walk so I can honor her way of wanting to present herself in public.

But to your point, I have gone over the waterfall. This morning we were shaken awake by a predawn thunderstorm that was Midwestern in magnitude and never happens here in SF. But I threw on my panties and bra, slip, and dress to go out and salvage my tools from the rain. It was my clothing, not my escape pod!