Hi Jenni - that's an incredibly insightful and helpful account of your own experience. It's funny what you say about people being more accepting of you coming out as gay than CD - society has had so much more exposure to and education about homosexuality than gender ambiguity, and as we know - we fear what we don't understand, right? I know that many people assume that cross dressing means you must be gay, anyway - or that it must be an expression of repressed homosexuality. That's what I'd like to challenge in my writing (I wrote an episode of Waterloo Road with a kid in it with gender identity issues, which pushed the boundaries as much as you can within a show like that). I guess in my experience, half my friends are gay/lesbian/bi - some single, some old, some in couples, some with kids - one close girl friend back with a man after decades of being with women - but I don't know any cross dressers, other than from the sort of punky/theatrical spectrum, (which may well be a more 'acceptable' side of CD expression) so it's heartening to hear from you that - as with all those different sexual orientations, that there is no hard and fast rule - or common experience, other than mostly you have all known that there was more than one way from a very young age. xx
