Not trans? Huh? I don't get it.

[ReineD]

Lori #26, well said!

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Katey888 #23, for years I believed as you do, that a strong desire to present as a woman necessarily indicates some degree of gender-discord. But, no longer. I think that many CDers dress for no other reason than it feels good, whether this is a form of excitement or a feeling of calmness, or because it just feels right. But whatever is the feeling obtained by the CDing, it is different than when dressed in regular male clothes, and I'm afraid that some CDers may extend the difference in feelings to a belief they must then have a partial female gender identity.

GD isn't about feeling good when dressing and looking like a woman. GD is rather not feeling in sync with one's male sexual identity (for MtFs). People who have GD are distressed with their male body and they hate that wives and everyone else in their lives think they are male. GD isn't something that turns on and off depending on how a person is dressed.

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Nadine #44 brought up a great point about not wanting to identify as a crossdresser, so as to not be confused with the people who dress for private pleasure, since Nadine does not dress for sex.

Still, not dressing for sex doesn't mean that by extension a person MUST be TS, or be "on the TS side", or have GD. A lot of people have passions they love and some that really drive them (think Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, or Beethoven when composing) without finding sexual gratification in it, so why should the CDing be any different? Also, I'm sure that even some CDers who do not dress for sex still from time-to-time have some sexual fantasies about it when they're in a sexual mood. This is just plain being human, so if some of you do fantasize occasionally, don't be thinking that you're purely fetish CDers.

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Isha #55 mentions getting moody and sullen when she doesn't CD, and wonders if this is GD. According to the WPATH, it isn't. GD is about experiencing distress with inhabiting the male body and the associated gender role (husband, father). Here's the definition:

Gender dysphoria: Distress that is caused by a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and that person’s sex assigned at birth (and the associated gender role and/or primary and secondary sex characteristics).

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Sometimes-miss #57, you dispute the label "transgender" for everyone who presents as a woman. You need to understand that people can cross a gender boundary and still very much have a male gender identity. Gender boundaries (or categories of gender) are a number of things that any society defines as typically male or female, including the clothing that people wear. In our society, women wear women's clothes and so any CDer does cross a gender boundary when he dresses in women's clothes for the purposes of emulating a woman. My dad has taken to buying women's woolen tights to wear under his pants in the winter (he's 85), and like the women who wear men's flannel shirts, this doesn't count. lol. My father does not do this for the reasons that CDers wear panties.

A CDer's actions (and not his gender identity) effectively place him under the Transgender Umbrella, together with all others who cross the gender boundaries in some way, even if their motives are different than CDers. Drag Queens are under the umbrella too, and they dress because it's their job!

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Tink #68, we can't confuse a woman's desire for power in a man's world and the actions she needs to take in order to accomplish this, for a desire to appear or feel male. Women who make it into the boardrooms of the world need to abandon clothing that emphasizes their sex, they need to be assertive and have presence, if they are to be taken seriously by the men they deal with. Likewise, if perchance a woman buys men's blue jeans because they fit her body type better than women's jeans, this is not a desire to appear male, unless of course s/he is FtM. It's not taboo in our society for women to wear jeans and flannel shirts.

I think that the vast majority of people are perfectly OK with presenting in the gender that coincides with their sex, meaning they are not making an outright effort to present as the opposite sex the way that members here do. And I doubt that the few women who do buy their clothes in men's stores and who are not F2M, do it because they have a thing for men's clothes. Still, it's important to remember there is indeed a wide range of "energies" if you will, within each sex. For example, just imagine 6 or 8 college-aged women sitting together. Some will be more traditionally feminine than the others, while some will be more angular, taller, or stockier, perhaps more sporty. But everyone at the table will still be unmistakably women, even if some of them don't focus on clothes or makeup like the others. It's very much a question of personal taste and in such a group (unless there are FtMs), no one is even remotely thinking of presenting male.