Many of us here often ponder on the “why” of CDing and we also often have the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate in an attempt to determine whether this condition has behavioural or genetic roots – someone in a reply earlier this week used the expression “..it’s in my DNA..” – but I know that many of you also have examples of circumstances that seemed to have facilitated, if not encouraged, that first experimentation. Personally, I still think that there’s something innate – genetic or personality based – that predisposes us to what we feel the need to do, and it’s led me to think some time back about the implications of that and it came up again earlier today in the ‘reveal’ thread – so I thought it was time to talk about it. (And Isha's been quiet lately so we could all do with the thinking exercise... sorry to get heavy midweek and just before Thanksgiving... )
What if we knew for sure that this was genetic, innate and hereditary (rather than environmental) and was something that had been passed down to you and was ultimately likely to impact your offspring, or theirs, or successive generations…?
All sorts of questions fall out of this for me – for while most of us say we accept this part of us and recognise that we are not doing anything ‘wrong’, that’s not necessarily the way the rest of the world perceives us and the fact that so many of us do decide to keep this from close friends and family, even if we undertake outings away from home, says that we understand the way that others feel about this, or at least we prefer to keep others misunderstandings and prejudices from impacting our lives detrimentally. We may not see it as wrong, but we should accept that some others do and will probably continue to think so.
So the interesting questions for me are:
If this was a definitively hereditary condition that would be passed on to successive generations of your family:
1) Would it change your perspective about declaring this condition to a potential spouse before starting a relationship or having children?
2) How would you feel about knowingly passing on something that we can accept is not wrong, but might still be a terrible burden or blight for those who are forced to accommodate this condition in their lifestyle or environment?
3) For the GGs here, how would you feel knowing that your sons (or daughters – but less likely) or grandsons may be compelled to pursue CDing to fully express themselves in life? And how would that make you feel about pre- or post-nuptial reveal?
(for clarity – my assumptions here are around just the condition that either makes us prone to CDing or being transgendered but NOT being TS and also that it was proven there was definitely no behavioural cause to the condition)
Makes me think – and I’d be interested to hear how others feel about it…
Katey x