Very interesting thread, I'm sorry I didn't see it earlier (Real Life has a way of interfering with Web life.) A lot of what I might have said has been said, and said better, by others already, but I can't resist throwing a few more vegetables into the stew.

I've long considered myself a feminist, or at least a "fellow traveller," and ever since I started actually trying wearing skirts and dresses and such (rather than just fantasizing about it), my feminist perspective has been a large part of how I deal with my desires and my integration of them into my sense of who I am. I've long questioned what most people in Western society assume about what it means to be male or be female, and find that most of what is said is pure baloney, regardless of the credentials of who says it. My questioning has gone into overdrive each time I try something new and look at myself in the mirror and then wonder: who is that that I see?

I don't see anything anti-feminist about dressing in "women's" clothes, or trying to "pass", or wearing girly or sissy fashions. If anything, when men wear these styles, it can eat away at the cultural assumption that skirts = female, etc.

What bothers me more is the way some CDs will talk as if they are being women when they do this, especially when they imply that that is what womanhood is about. There's enough propaganda out there claiming that a woman isn't a woman if she doesn't have makeup on or isn't dressed like a model (or a prostitute) or doesn't have 6 inch heels, without CDs adding to it. They may feel that they are just trying to explain how they feel, but we do not live in a vacuum. How we see ourselves and describe ourselves is both deeply affected by the culture that we live in (like fish are affected by water) and also influences it. It may seem natural to equate, say, make-up and high heels with womanhood, because that's what we've grown up with, but when we don't make the effort to examine and re-evaluate these ideas, we perpetuate them. To think and talk in sexist categories is to reinforce them.