I remember a few episodes of Star Trek when the antagonists "looked" like humans but when they turned off the "covergirl" software, they were some UGLY folks, just trying to look the part. Well, that's us kind of in a nutshell. We look like regular people, we sleep, we eat, we work, but the minute we appear in a dress or skirtsuit, we are those extra terrestrial beasts to the viewers.
If gay is a chosen lifestyle, people have been choosing it for long before the bible came around. If crossdressing is a sin, then, we've been sinning since time immemorial.
Reine brought up anew the topic of why we do what we do. The plain and simple (and not so simple) answer is: this is what we're supposed to be doing! The fault dear Brutus lies not in our stars, but in our CHEMISTRY.
Back in the days when a lot of things were crawling out of the primordial soup, something crawled out that eventually turned into homo sapiens. Everything, and I mean everything is CHEMISTRY (the full complement of proteins produced by an individual of a species is estimated that each human produces approximately 90,000 types of proteins) Regardless of what form your body takes the shape of, it is the internal chemistry that makes it all go.
Gregor Mendel put the finger on the pulse of genetics about 150 years ago and showed how 2 peas in pod could produce some interesting results. All because of chemistry ( I am really simplifying here). The two people in a pod 5 million years ago got the human ball rolling and what with mixing it up with the Neanderthals a bit, and probably a lot of what would now be considered inbreeding, we wind up with tall people (gigantism), short people (dwarfism) blue eyes (we are ALL related to ONE pair of humans from about 6000 years ago) ( "the principle of independent assortment explains why the human inheritance of a particular eye color does not increase or decrease the likelihood of having 6 fingers on each hand") , people with 6 toes, Siamese twins, brown hair, the Elephant man, and all those in between. It is pretty amazing when you think about, that most of us actually look similar in so many ways considering ALL THAT CAN GO WRONG.
Fragile-X syndrome occurs in about every 1000 births--and 1 in 700 women carry that gene that produces this: " Most fragile-X males have large testes, big ears, narrow faces, and sensory integration dysfunctions that result in learning disabilities. " I have read that there is a 1:5 chance of a birth defect among newborns.
People have been cross dressing in every place on earth among every society for millenia so we CANNOT ascribe this interest we have to having been born on the corner of 3rd and Lexington, or our mother's having sniffed the air wafting from the Castro district in S.F. or to the fact that some of us crawled at an early age into our mother's panty hose. How would that explain the guy from ECUADOR in 1940? Or the guy in Egypt 2000 years ago. It can be explained by chemistry though--I'm certain of it. Nature poured too much of x or y into the beaker that is called the human body and we are what you see. Whether that means are we something trapped in the wrong body ---what is the WRONG body? If the world now has more than 6 billion people and half are males and 1 percent do this thing that we do so well, that means about 30 million of us are buying clothes on-line from VS! Are we what keep that stocking and garter business going? It is simply NOT possible ---IN MY MIND--that this can be anything other than we are just another form of human being doing something we were clearly "meant to do". A hybrid if you will. We're the cross between the apple and pear. "Living better through chemistry". (Speaking of apples, if you plant a seed from your favorite apple you will get a tree that will produce any one of 5000--yes, 5000 varieties of apples. The only way you will get the apple you want is by grafting from the tree that already grows the apple you want on to the new tree). Nature is funny that way.
The other half of the story, of course, is related to what triggers this internal chemical stew we are born with.. So many here have indicated that the "age of puberty" was the starting point. CHEMISTRY again. So the trigger is clearly chemical and when the body is setting the compass we find ourselves going south instead of north thanks to millions of years of the wrong mix in the beaker. What we do is not so bad. It is just that as human males we are not supposed to be standing on a rock in the middle of the river trying to scoop up a salmon on its way to drop off a load of babies. We were supposed to be sitting at the table, fork in hand, eating out peas, and minding our Qs. We are not wrong, the problem lies with the viewer of this program because the "cloaking software" is off, and we look like monsters in some sci-fi movie. We have done the best we could do with the chemistry given to us.
Musical prodigies are born to ordinary parents, math whizzes come from regular familes and they cannot choose to NOT follow that path because it is in their chemistry. Choosing what seems to be for the woman in us is no different. We are not able to say NO--I want some other chemistry. We are the product of millions of years of mother nature's experiments and there is no going against that. We can choose to play our instruments at home, do our math puzzles on the 64000 dollar question or something else. That is where the problem is--how do we catch that salmon without looking like a big, brown bear. Some of us take the difficult path and fix the body to resemble the internal chemistry. Some of us take some bad chemistry and end it all. Most of us though try to deal with the viewing public who claim to be in the wrong theater---they want to see astronauts on the moon, not invaders from mars. sadly, there is no "one answer fits all". Nature has dealt us this hand, we can fold or play it.
