I agree that there is too much confusion with the term transgendered. To me it should really only be used to describe those who float in-between the two binaries and suffer gender dysphoria as a result.
As you said everyone is in fact a mixture of both male and female and so it is not useful to use the transgendered term unless they experience gender dysphoria. And most Cds do not suffer from dysphoria at all. Rather they just want the freedom to express their own femininity - basically in essence they are the male equivalent of tomboys.
The desire to emulate is nothing more than the desire to submerge yourself in your fantasy/escapist role-playing where satisfaction is obtained by making the experience as close as possible to reality so that we believe we an have the same experiences as GGs. The role-playing can reach the point where the CD essentially creates a whole new character that he can switch into whenever he wants to escape from his male reality. You could say that crossdressing is the real-life version of the many examples of on-line fantasy role-playing games that many people become seriously addicted to. Instead of immersing yourself into a computer generated character in a fantasy setting, we use ourselves as the canvas and use the real world as the backdrop. You cannot get more immersive than that!
The problem with accepting the above explanation is that it is not very satisfying and sympathetic compared to claiming the reason behind the crossdressing is transgenderism and that we were born this way. It is a hard sell to convince anyone to accept us, especially our SOs, if we were to explain our desire as fantasy role-playing. Even SOs who have accepted their cding partners would not want to depart from the transgendered explanation.
There is a further complication. Neither gender nor sexual orientation is set in stone. Our desires and self-identity can change if we will it hard enough and for long enough. Some older CDs will find that they slowly drifted away and even abandoned their male gender role in order to accommodate and expand their feminine desires. They become increasingly negative and dismissive about masculinity while worshiping the alter of femininity. So there is a slow gradual process in which cds who begin as begin as non-transgendered can turn themselves into transgendered beings - if the will and desire is strong enough. So you can end up with a confusing mixture of crossdressers - some are transgendered, most are not but many are on life paths that will slowly make them so.
