My wife doesn't like the idea of her husband crossdressing (late coming out on my part). As she considers herself a tolerant person in gender matters, she wonders if the fact that she dislikes my crossdressing invalidates that.
This is something that I sometimes read in these forums: women are very accepting of crossdressers, until, until (drum roll...) it lands in their backyard with their husband/SO presenting as a woman on occasions. Then here goes tolerance!
Well. Maybe not. We had a very interesting discussion about that with my wife, and starting with this topic of crossdressing and trying to draw analogies with other situations proved more tricky than it first seemed.
The problem:
- As a woman you say that you are tolerant with crossdressers, you acknowledge their existence and consider that everyone can live their life the way they want.
- Your husband/SO, present or future, happens to be one of them.
- You don't accept it (or struggle with it).
- Ergo, you are not tolerant, please go back and scratch that point 1.
Actually there's a logical flaw in this point 4.
Trying another analogy:
- As an individual, you have no objection about people eating fish.
- Ergo you should be eating fish.
Wrong? And yet, the above example is just a condensed version of the previous one .
We tried various other analogies that I will spare you with, but at the end of the discussion we came to the conclusion that my wife was a tolerant person. She doesn't mind people crossdressing. She just doesn't want to be in a relationship with a crossdresser herself, and that is totally her right. Just like I don't like eating fish, but am very tolerant with people who do (except when they microwave it at the office. There should be laws against this).
The flaw in point 4 was to confuse the tolerance for a practice with a personal involvement in the said practice. Like, a heterosexual GG may perfectly be comfortable with lesbian couples without wanting to engage in such a relationship.
In my opinion the NIMBY qualifier doesn't apply to unaccepting or moderately accepting wives that consider themselves tolerant to crossdressers. It would apply only if they said that having a crossdressing husband should not be a problem, before they had a chance of being confronted to the situation in their own couple. Otherwise, they are just being tolerant with other people's' practices without wanting to personally engage in them.
Which I think is a good start to building an accepting society for crossdressers.