[SIZE="2"]The short answer is that I don’t feel like a woman when I crossdress, because I have no idea how a woman feels. A transgendered person, on the other hand, would feel like a woman, I assume...[/SIZE]Originally Posted by Monicamaryjay
[SIZE="2"]I just wonder why the term transgender has been adopted to include all types of crossdressers, that’s all – wouldn’t gender-shifter, or a similar term, be more apropos? In the spirit of the NHL’s announcement of a new CBA agreement earlier today, I will concede that crossdressing is, or can be, a "transgendered act," and crossdressing itself is a kind of transgendered experience, but I do not become transgendered by wearing women’s clothes, and an insistence on being transgendered has not initiated my urge to crossdress. Trust me, it hasn’t. It happened the other way around, in my case, and awareness about transgender came later. When you crossdress, it’s only natural to wonder about your sexuality (societal pressure, I believe), but my feet are firmly planted in my birth gender, no matter what type of shoes I choose to wear. So, you could say that the MtF crossdresser has feelings about transgender “come along for the ride” when he dresses up, whether he wants them to or not...
Which leads me to this point – MtF crossdressing is LIKE an amusement park ride, or any ride, a ride of transgendered proportions if you will, but the crossdresser only rides for a while before going home and changing back into a pumpkin (BTW, I get dizzy easily). He has to, because he is not genetically predisposed to stay on the ride 24/7. To some, crossdressing is a pleasant diversion, nothing more and nothing less, so all this expected association with TG takes the bloom off the pretty rose we are trying to admire. To be fair, there are perhaps a million or more shades of grey between a man who only wears panties under his male clothes, and a transgendered individual who lives their life contrary to their birth gender all the live long day. I think it’s a bit farfetched to include the hobbyist or fetishist crossdresser under the imaginary transgendered umbrella, IMHO, and unfair to TG’s, I might add...
I do recognize the reason why this umbrella has been created, of course – people want to belong to something, or have their lifestyle recognized and understood, hopefully to have their rights as human beings protected, same as any other group. That’s all well and good IF you’re genuinely transgendered, but, speaking for myself, I don’t fit in. I would be very uneasy sitting in a room amongst a group of actual TG’s. Why? Well, there’s nothing I could talk about with them. We may all be dressed relatively the same, but for different reasons, plus I don’t have to be dressed as a woman, while they, by definition, MUST dress as women (they're transgendered, remember?). That would make me very nervous. I mean, I can’t say something like the crossdressers.com standard, “What color panties are you wearing?” because I wouldn’t pose such a question to a woman, or a group of women. I am a gentleman, you know. Maybe you didn’t know that. Anyway, they (the TG’s) either are women, or they believe themselves to be women, while I am just dressing as a woman, i.e. crossdressing. I could, and probably would, ask another MtF CD about his/her chromatic choice of panties, no doubt expecting a girly giggle or two, but that’s different. See what I’m talking about?
I’ll confine my weird analogies to LGBT, OK? If a woman kisses another woman now and then, does that mean she’s a lesbian? Not necessarily, right? If a man has a homosexual experience, does it automatically follow that he is a gay male? It depends, I suppose, but bear with me. Just because I’m a male, yet I wear women’s clothing on occasion, doesn’t mean that I’m transgendered. Oh, I might be, or I might want to be recognized as transgendered for one reason or another, but some of us just crossdress for the sake of crossdressing – the author of this piece is one of them, and I know there are others out there, somewhere beyond the fringe of the imaginary umbrella...
I’ll tell you what starts discussions like this – someone (no names, please) will say something like, “ALL X must be Y, and we can forget about Z!” This happened over on that “Gender and Sex” thread the other day, and such stubborn pronouncements of this nature always make me respond with multiple paragraphs. That in turn spawns another thread, with more verbiage and TG rhetoric like, “Oh yeah, as a matter of fact X IS always Y!” leading to this thread, which I would prefer not to write, truth be told, but somebody has to question this stuff and initiate discussion for "ordinary" crossdressers. A space has been provided to do just that. I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to understand the basic premise I have outlined. I try to word these things very carefully, which means that I DO NOT mean “achieve” when I write “get at,” OK? Give me a break, and please give a break to all the crossdressers among the TG’s...
PS - We've only just begun...[/SIZE]
