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We do wonder about ourselves, don't we?
Nope. I figured it out a long time ago. It took me about 30 years, but I figured it out. No more wondering.
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I wonder how our perception of a woman's way in the world is formed by our individual experiences with the women in our lives, and how our little hobby* portrays those experiences and our reaction to them.
It's not my hobby. If it was, it would be pretty easy to just get a different fun hobby.
My perception of what GG's life is like, is through observation, not only of my friends and relatives, but pretty much every woman I observe, including what I learned in the media. But that's not what caused the gender identity dysphoria and the resulting crossdressing. I was abused as a kid; until I was 6, I was a normal boy. Then told that god made a mistake, that I was really supposed to be a girl, and having my male genitalia almost completely disappear whenever I was exposed to the cold, reinforced that belief. All I knew back then, was that boys had penis and testicles, and girls did not, and it appeared that very often, I did not, either. I was told that it was god getting me used to not having them, so when he fixed me, I'd be ready to be the girl I was supposed to be. Believing that through most of my early life, sort of cemented it into my mind, and even though I now know it was erroneous, I can't seem to get rid of the feeling that I'm supposed to dress and behave as a female does.
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What do we become when we shelve our masculinity for a moment or two?
I don't 'shelve my masculinity'.The masculine and interpreted feminine feelings I have remain constant, no matter how I'm dressed. I've simply learned how to 'act' like a normal man whenever I have to..... sort of. Sex can be problematic; having basically been someone's girlfriend for several years until I was 14, that role is also sort of embedded into my mind as the appropriate behavior during interpersonal interactions as well as sex. I can 'act' like a normal guy, but it requires mental gymnastics, as I have to think I'm doing something, while doing something else entirely. It frequently causes erectile dysfunction; not entirely, but often loss of erection during the sexual episode. That, of course, causes the woman I'm with to question what's wrong with her, or with me.
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we become something very specific to ourselves. The mannerisms, the behavior, the target of our efforts to adorn ourselves in feminine fashion
I sort of become the girl that I thought god was going to change me into; that girl, is stuck in adolescence. I sort of thought that I would become a girl around the age of puberty, when all the other girls were experiencing the changes that made them more 'womanly'. As I did't reach puberty until 17, all through high school, I just thought that god had forgotten about me, so I prayed and prayed even harder, to no avail, of course. Eventually I had to face that everything I had been told about everything was a lie. Problem was, apparently when you go through all those feelings during certain developmental years, some of those feelings become permanent.
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I feel a certain relief when I'm dressing as if I've dropped a burden
I believe that in many cases, this is just a result of our minds getting some relief from the gender identity dysphoria which occurs in the conscious or subconscious mind. When we wear female specific clothes, and behave in female specific ways, it reinforces the concept that we ARE female, at least for a while, we are able to 'fool' our minds into no longer feeling the discomfort from the incongruence between what we deep down feel we are, and what we really are. It's no surprise that this is a common feeling, as many of us were brought up to believe that being feminine in any way, or like a girl/woman in any way, was the most disgraceful thing a boy/man could be. So many 'bury' that thought, because their minds cannot accept it. We see this especially, in those who need to create a third person, a feminine persona, to attribute all their feminine feelings to, because they feel the need to distance their 'real' male self away from being or feeling anything feminine, due to the shameful feelings that might elicit.
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That beautiful, feminine female person - does she resent my intrusion into her world? Would she understand if I tried to explain how my visit makes me feel? I'd confess that I know I'm just visiting, just playing at what is her reality.
I didn't 'get it' until I tried to explain to my wife (at the time) what I was going through. Previously, I didn't understand that we don't actually fall in love with the person; we fall in love with what we KNOW OF that person; we create an image in our mind of who we believe them to be. Any discovery that severely changes that image in our mind, can easily cause a change in how we believe them to be, and the love felt, can also change or be lost, if the sexual attraction that went with that image, is now gone. My wife seeing me as a feminine person rather than the all masculine person she thought she married, destroyed her attraction to me; it was only a short way to lose the love for me as well, as she felt I had deceived her as to who I was. In all fairness, when we met, I hadn't crossdressed in 10 years, and thought that either I had 'beaten it' or just outgrown it, perhaps just a phase I was going through. It turned out that my mind had just repressed all those gender/crossdressing feelings, which remained repressed until the other stresses in my life became more than I could handle, and the crossdressing 'genie' escaped from the bottle.
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Would she understand my utter fascination with everything that makes her - her?
Mind did not. She didn't really like what she saw as the limitations of her gender, and couldn't understand why any man would want to embrace and experience the feminine life and lifestyle. She didn't understand that it's not simply a wish for what she felt we might see it as if being female was considered an easier life, but more that it was an inner desire to feel and behave as what my mind believed I was supposed to be. I couldn't get across to her, that there was now this almost constant 'always in the back of my mind' feeling that I was in the wrong clothes, the wrong role, and perhaps even in the wrong type of body; and it was often interrupting the rest of my thoughts, sometimes all day long. Which made doing everything just a little harder, all the time, kind of like having a pebble in your shoe, which interrupts every other thought.
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Would she respect me more if I wanted with all my heart and mind to live where she lives, to go there with full commitment and permanence? Would she think I was crazy to desire her life?
I think that most women are sympathetic to men who are going through this, but they also desperately want a masculine man as their mate. Leaving that role, leaves a hole in their lives, and it can make them very, very sad. And feeling that we have abandoned that role in order to make ourselves feel better, can make them very angry at us, because they feel we owe them to be who we were when we got married, and always stay that way. They reserve the right to change, for themselves, but they cannot see that as unfair to US. Women are allowed to change; we, are not.
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Does she think I'm crazy to desire her life even for an afternoon or an evening at a time
I think that women believe that men's lives have so many advantages over their own, that we are foolish to want to live theirs.
All this is my opinion only, derived from my lifetime of experiences, and reading everything that I could get my hands on about gender, crossdressing, transsexualism, and speaking/writing to others who have an interest in our lives. Take it for what you will.
