When I look back to when this all started, well, it didn't so much start, it's more that it's always been there, this girl inside me wanting to get out, wanting to express herself, I often end up remembering those first few steps along the way. As I say, I can't remember a time when I didn't feel that I was a girl and so, from the moment that I knew that it was girls who wore dresses, I wanted to wear a dress. My mother even let me do this once, but only once. But the need didn't go away and didn't diminish and so I started, as I believe is common, using bath towels as surrogate clothes. When I discovered where my mother kept her clothes, particularly her underwear I started a short period of overdressing.
Then came one of the most important days of my life, though I couldn't know it at the time. It occurred to me, that rather than putting the clothes on over my everyday clothes, I should wear just them, as, and this is the important bit, I would be doing what a girl would be doing and just importantly, feeling what a girl would be feeling.
And that is what has defined me and my dressing ever since. Even as a child and teenager, I wouldn't really have passed, I certainly wouldn't pass now, but that, to me, isn't the point. What is important to me is that when I dress I'm making the choices that a female would make and I feeling the feelings, (the snug fit of the bra straps, the looseness of a slinky top, the swish of a skirt about my legs, the grip of a ladies shoe). There are soo many different sensations that are available to women that are simply not available to men: long; short or something in the middle; tighter fitteing of loose and flowing; lacy, slinky or something more constricting; a skirt and top or a dress; hair up or down; the list is more or less endles.
And this is the nub, in making these choices, in dressing the way that I am, I am making the same choices that a GG has made, I am thinking in the way that a GG has done. And this is never more true than when I'm out and about and I see a GG walking along the street is something that I have a home. This happened a few weeks back when I saw a woman walking along wearing the same short green faux leather skirt that I have from the Sainsbury's TU range. In that moment, I feel totally connected with that person in a purely female sense as we have both gone into the shop, we have had the intention of buying clothes, we have both seen the skirt, liked it enough to buy it and then worn it purely for the want of wearing it.
As I said searlier, I can't look like a girl (I sometimes wish I could, but realistically I can't [I'm thinking about using a dressing service to test this thesis though]), but the one thing that I can do is have the same wishes, desires and, just importantly when it comes to wearing clothes, feelings.
I wonder what other people think to this idea of dressing as being a mental (thinking and feeling) thing?
