Sounds more like a case of ... "My dog is better than yours"
Sounds more like a case of ... "My dog is better than yours"
Ask him if he or any other gay people he knows choose where/when to openly display their sexuality. If so, say,"then by the same argument you gave about me, your being gay is a CHOICE."
[SIZE="3"]Gender is a state of mind[/SIZE]
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Yes its a choice - tell me your joking ?Originally Posted by Jenny Brown
It's a choice unless someone is forcing you to CD at gunpoint.
Have you any idea how many Crossdresser's have tried to give up and cant !!!
Its part of who we are.
There are those who suffer even more because they don't like the idea of dressing.
I guess we need to make this clear to the gay community too.
Last edited by Shelly Preston; 07-24-2009 at 10:42 AM. Reason: added text
[SIZE="2"]This is excellent advice. Ignorance is definitely not bliss! There are a lot of shades of grey here, in our community, and in the gay & lesbian community, but we tend to be lumped together…[/SIZE]
[SIZE="2"]More excellent advice…[/SIZE]
[SIZE="2"]Then his/her experience must have been shallow, incomplete, and tainted by laziness and/or prejudice. If you can’t research something yourself, or think before you speak, you deserve to be ignored. I must say I think the word “choice” is overused these days – involuntary is a nicer word (in our case)![/SIZE]
I'm not addressing all the psychological aspects. That wasn't the thread title. The act of putting on the clothes is still a "choice".
If you want stop cd-ing, stop putting on the clothes.
Last edited by Shelly Preston; 07-24-2009 at 10:43 AM. Reason: fixed quote
point well said we don't have a choice
again we don't have a choice
so we try to live with this and together help support each other because we have no choice
Last edited by Shelly Preston; 07-24-2009 at 10:43 AM. Reason: fixed quote
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
For me it is choice and an obsession to dress and possibly transition, so if the group is having problems with my intent or future as a CD or TG then the cord is clipped. I spent a lifetime of politics at work and elsewhere and I do not need it here to. If you don't like the setting, do yourself a favor and give it a boot to the back side and do your exiting interview so they know why you are leaving. Maybe they will do some solesearching.
end of my rant
Teri
And then there's those who suffer EVEN MORE THAN THAT.....
Because they don't dress in consideration of the wishes of a loved one.
Tri-ess is specifically directed in their charter to be only for heterosexual crossdressers and their partners. I think part of that is to assure the spouses that their husbands will not be transitioning and leaving them behind.
I find support groups of all kinds very helpfull. Sometimes you need them, sometimes you don't. This forum is a support group too you know!
Sally
A choice? A choice?? How do you figure that this is a choice? This is no more a choice than the fact that I have blue eyes. I did not get to choose what eye color I have, and I did not choose to dress in womens clothing either. This is something we are born with, and try as we may, can not overcome. Possibly for some fetish dressers, this is a choice, but to the vast majority I would assume, this is not a choice..gif "Big Roll Eyes")
I think the problem here is one of unproductive comparative pain (my own term). Your gay acquaintance has likely experienced pain in his life and will, like most humans, elevate the status of his own experience. He then associates with his group (gay men) and elevates their status, as a result of his own personal elevation. He then looks to other groups and concludes that they are not as good as his group.
Interestingly, this cycle often requires the person to find a less-well-accepted group (e.g., crossdressers) with which to make their comparisons. In other words, such a man would likely not make a similar type of comparison to the pain experienced by a black man facing racism; that would be widely acknowledged as ridiculous. However, crossdressers still have no status (at least in the U.S.; Britain seems slightly different), so he can elevate his group and his own personal identification at your group's expense.
There has been a lot of interesting academic writing on group affiliation and how a person experiences their association with a group. People often start by saying "I am not part of that group", but move quickly into a gruding "ok, maybe I am", and then "yeah, darn it, I am a member of that group, what of it?", and then "my group is better than your group!", then (much later) into something like "yes, I am part of that group, but also many others". Sadly, since it is a spectrum, movement across all elements of the spectrum is not guaranteed.
I tried for an hour to get an analogy like that! Great!
Clayfish, I too decided against going to any organized TG meetings here. Cattiness was the reason. The group all worried about the right way to look frumpy...oh I mean to pass and basically told me I was too ...uh ****ty... to be in the club. Now as to stabbing in the back I see that more at the bars.
The earth is the mother of all people and all people should have equal rights upon it.
Chief Joseph
Nez Perce
“Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” - Fred Rogers,
You should have smacked him with your purse. Maybe people see CD/TVs like debutantes- when we "finally" realize that we want hormones and surgery, there's to be some kind of big formal pageant where we're introduced into the TS/TG community.
(Keep in mind, i have ZERO plans for hormones, etc. That's just my own personal choice as I classify myself with cd's and tv's.)
"Oh f*ckkk!! Chick's a dude!" - from textsfromlastnight
me: I wonder what it'd be like to play golf en femme.
wifey: It's hotter and sweatier.
Tracy, I know LGBT and TG/TS/CD run in families and are somehow neurological or hormonal in nature and I know for certain that there are mental health professionals as far back as the forties who think so. Even though there are also mental health professionals who think we can be "behaviorally modified" or else they accept us but won't talk about all this stuff at length with us because they're straight and it gives them the willys to actually sit down with a transgender or gay person or CD and "talk shop". Please try to explain to your gay freind that we've all got to stick together! I think the Obama years are going to see a lot of progress. I live in very nice disabled and senior housing and I saw in a document in the front office of our complex that they can't discriminate in this type of housing because of sexual or gender orientation.
Anyhow,studies have been done and m to f crossdressers respond to pastel colors, intricate music and alpha female leadership while they are still very small! Granted,they can still be masculine in many respects but they are still very much crossdressers! I'm 53 and I was not really aware of the concept of the "crossdresser" until about 1978 or 1979. Before that it was "Transvestitism" which while there was beginning to be some tolerance,transvestitism was hand in glove with "homosexuality" and "transexualism". I kept real quiet about my crossdressing. I assumed in my mind's eye that I had something double screwy the matter with me even though one of my favorite pleasures was/is dressing!
I think it is definitely a choice!!
Don't forget....you could always be naked!
So....dressed (feminine of course), or naked!!
See?? Choices!
You go girl!
No, the obvious question would be - How do you figure that this is NOT a choice? You could just as easily put male jeans and a T-shirt on - correct? It is a choice. Is someone threatening you with physical harm if you DON'T wear women's clothing?A choice? A choice?? How do you figure that this is a choice? This is no more a choice than the fact that I have blue eyes. I did not get to choose what eye color I have, and I did not choose to dress in womens clothing either. This is something we are born with, and try as we may, can not overcome. Possibly for some fetish dressers, this is a choice, but to the vast majority I would assume, this is not a choice.
Jenny
Does it need to be physical harm ?
What about the mental health of an individual ?
You're going off topic. The title of this thread is "Is This a Choice?" plain & simple. Nothing in that title addresses mental health.
Did you read Jenny's comment at all, or is English not your first language? Nobody is arguing that we "choose" to be crossdressers; it has been established up one forum and down the other that most of us have had this compulsion since our teen years or much earlier. What we can choose is when, and how often, to give in to that compulsion and put on the dresses, or makeup, or bra, or whatever. Those of us who live in the closet make that choice every day - we CHOOSE whether to go out in public in guy clothes and not face any grief from a hostile world. Yes, you absolutely choose to dress in women's clothing. What you do not have any choice in is the desire to do so. Now, do you see the difference?
Last edited by Ralph; 07-24-2009 at 03:05 PM.
Thank you, Ralph. Finally...someone gets it.
Yes I can choose to get up in the morning and not dress as a woman and be miserable all day or I can choose to dress the way I need too in order to get through the day. Is this a choice any of us want to make. I don't think so. I did have a theripist tell me you do have a choice which is true the problem is almost all of the time the choice is not a good one or the right one if you choose not to be who you are and live your life the way your heart and mind tell you to do.
I would say the desire is not a choice but fulfilling it is. Sort of like Socrates in the Symposium or the Phaedrus. Just because Socrates desired Alcibiades doesn't mean he ever actualized it.
The thread sounds more to me like the "choice" that's being talked about isn't about choosing to dress on Wenesday. It's choosing to dress at all. That's not a choice.
The thread started about showing up to a support meeting, having made the CHOICE to be in drab, and being told that, "Oh, I guess you're not really a CD." The thread started about choosing to be a CD, and has devolved into choosing what, when,how to dress and act it out.
Don't you just love threads like these, which go off on all sorts of tangents?
When I make a choice, I try to take into account, ALL the factors which are both the causes of my choice and the consequences thereof.
Like Peter, Paul and Mary, I am trying to lay my message between the lines ...
I really have been treated well by most gay/lesbian people I have met. You are always going to find a jerk in every crowd. I don't think your encounter is going to be common...at least from my experience.
You may have a choice not to dress all the time but you still are a crossdresser. It is not a choice. You are always a crossdresser, even when you aren't dressed.
I think that some gay/lesbian people might look down at crossdressers because they feel that they aren't putting themselves in a position to be ridiculed...basically hiding who they are. But there are a lot of gay/lebsians that are in the closet too...just like a lot of us are.
To discriminate for any reason is wrong. For a gay person to discriminate against a crossdresser seams crazy to me. Afterall, they should know how it feels to have people look down on them for being different.
Kisses,
Allie
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