Anger :(

[Krisi]

.... it's hard to understand how a person can own hundreds of dollars worth of pads, forms, wigs, etc and routinely put on makeup and women's clothes and still somehow think they're not transgender..........

So now we're going to decide who is transgender and who is not based on the cost of their feminine "stuff"? Where is the line? One hundred dollars? Five hundred dollars? A thousand or more dollars? And spent over what period of time? All at once or spread out.

I don't think that's going to work because some of us have more disposable income than others. Perhaps we should know the percentage of a person's income that's spent on feminine stuff.

Really, the problem here is that we judge people based on our own personal experiences and our own environment. Your signature line goes like this:

I am not a woman; I don't want to be a woman; I don't want to be mistaken for a woman.
I am not a man; I don't want to be a man; I don't want to be mistaken for a man.
I am a transgender person. And I'm still figuring out what that means.

This makes you very different from me so it's not surprising that you would look at the subject of crossdressing and crossdressers differently than I or some other people would. It would be nice if we could "all get along" but until we allow each other to be ourselves, that's not going to happen. And if some long term members "bully" the newer members, there will soon be nothing but the bullies left on this forum. It would be easy for a new member to post a few questions, get shut down by a bunch of negative replies and decide this is not the place for them.

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Charlotte, what a great example of what is happening here. I especially like this paragraph, and I hope that Kas, Sue, Krisi and others do get it.

"I suppose what all this goes to show is that there are labels and labels and labels. And that the label that we give ourselves is valid and should be respected, but that may be different from the label that the outside world would use and understand. And that too has to be understood and respected. It just goes to show that naming things, even naming ourselves, is a minefield."

What you are missing is that this forum is not the "outside world". Far from it. The outside world puts us all in one category and puts a very negative label on all of us. In the outside world, men wear men's clothing and women wear women's clothing. In the outside world, if you have a penis, you are a male. If you have a vagina, you are a female. In the outside world, there is no "in between" and you can't change from one to the other.

That's the outside world.