Tapeworm or butterfly?

[phili]

Thanks everyone for the responses!

I am too casual with metaphors- and the tapeworm is certainly an ugly beast. I polished and enhanced and ignored the reality of the real tapeworm, and used it as a single animalian representation of the river of demand for crossdressing that courses endlessly through me and demands attention and resources. I think the resolution of the dilemma is, as was pointed out- that we resolve the feeling of need [the tapeworm] when we emerge as the butterfly [the crossdressed us].

When you first met with the therapist;
. what goals did you come up with that you wanted to achieve through counseling ?
. do you feel like you are meeting those goals ?
. Are you looking to change a behavior ? or accept a behavior ?

To answer those questions:
The MC goal was to help my wife and I find a resolution of some kind to our parallel and opposing needs.
It is helping, as my wife feels he is a true 'friend'- someone who fully understands her and accepts her and is not trying to tell her to change, but is offering emotional support for managing her raw emotions.
I feel my own internal states are evolving with respect to understanding and framing my gender identity and expression. There is a lot of choice involved with living- in terms of what we share, how we share, etc. and a lot of necessity with respect to the same things.

I find my sense of desperate need to show myself as a mirl goes down rapidly after I have a day out. Then I am comfortable underdressing in androgynous clothes and feeling like any other woman might who is not making a point of her femininity. Then after a while I am falling back into habits of manliness that are not satisfying, I feel the 'tapeworm' and I want to emerge from the cocoon- so I go out again dressed in a way that says 'I am a mirl- and perfectly at ease in quite feminine mode.' Rinse and repeat.

I would spend more time dressed femininely if my wife was ok with it. But she isn't. When I dress that way I am choosing to 'speak' to her as a mirl, which is troubling to her. She might compare it to my insisting on playing loud music she hates. I don't like seeing her in pain, and want to avoid causing her pain whenever possible. Ever so slowly we are coping with the mismatch in timing, if nothing else, with respect to our views on gender and need to define ourselves in the binary.

She can tell me she hates seeing me dressed, and that it interferes with her desire to speak to me or even look at me, and with her willingness to let me massage her and help her with her back injury- but then she lets me help her, and she does look and speak to me. She can say that she knows she is central to my life, and I care about her more than anyone else, and also that she thinks I don't care that she can't cope with my crossdressing. I can say that I am hoping that she will pay attention to my real individuality.

Though you know that crossdressing is a harmless behavior, even you are prone to subconscious feelings that it's a bad thing. It's something that most of us have to deal with a lot.

Yes- the tapeworm metaphor reflects the basic internalization that wanting to crossdress is ' a problem'- but I never felt it was a 'bad' thing to feel like a girl-just that it was dangerous in the face of men's violence and women's complicity with it. I absolutely know I do feel like a girl, and in that sense I feel both the good and bad of it- all the pleasure of femininity, and all the hassles and diminishment and danger that expressing femininity can bring to girls and women IRL. I do not feel that my femininity is a bad thing- I feel it is an inborn, necessary, and, on inspection- a very good thing.

However, femininity for males is a minority position in most societies, with lots of negative social consequences wherever minority positions are not progressively embraced and welcomed.

Being a mirl openly has the added difficulty of messing with people's sense of sexuality, in addition to their entitlement to social privilege as males or females.

So I am careful and measured about how I express my mirlness, but I am not hiding it or embarrassed by it.

[Alice Torn]

Sometimes Miss, Very well said and you hit it out of the park Western society, especially American, still has a real stigma and negative point of view about men not being masculine ALL THE TIME, and women especially , other than some very feminist , do not RESPECT men who show "weakness, or feminine traits, especially wearing clothes made for women. i do not know of one woman i have talked with about it, who does not think it is creepy, sick, or wrong.