I couldn't help responding to that comment. My wife and I have "messed around" at times when I was "dressed." Or half "dressed" anyway. And once she confessed to me that she thought our daughter was conceived on one of those occasions. My wife called her "Lori's baby." What a compliment!Originally Posted by jacques
Genetics, epigenetics, what the heck. Not forgetting intrauterine "accidents" of various kinds, regardless of genes. In particular the hormonal environment in utero affects the development and gendering of the brain. Any kind of variation can happen. After all, Darwin's whole point was that evolution depends on random variation. Otherwise there would be no "evolution." We would all be viruses at best, just a fragment of RNA; not even "DNA." And variations don't necessarily die out. Many of them are keep reproducing, possibly for precisely the reason Jacques was quoting above (hee hee!), and sometimes for more complex reasons involving survival benefits to collateral lines of inheritance. Then too, some of the same variations keep cropping up randomly again and again, like Down syndrome for instance.
Anyway the bottom line for me is that if I've got some "feminine traits" that make me a crossdresser, I'm far happier to know I was born with them, through one physiological mechanism or another. Would I rather not have been? It's too late to say that now. I'm just "me," and I've nothing to complain about in the end, though it was awkward having to hide my crossdressing in my teens, among other handicaps. ("Handicaps" can be anything including having to accommodate two wardrobes instead of one.)
Still, I have to recognize that compared with meeting the human norm ("straight," "cisgender" and other newfangled terms for old and timeless things), being a crossdresser, still more for anyone transgender, or gay for that matter, is a "tougher row to hoe." How much worse it would be if we had to torture ourselves by constantly asking "Who was it that made us this way? Was it our parents, the way they treated us? Or someone else? Who was to blame?" And there have been "theories" about that, which I think are mostly nonsense. Like the famous one about gay men being the product of a cold, distant father and a smothering (or overcompensating) mother. As for my being, not gay, just a little more feminine than most men, I could have blamed my mother, who I think would have preferred to have a girl. Did she steer me in a "feminine" direction?
Who needs to be bothered by questions like that?--especially if they feel these problems have wrecked their lives (which thank goodness mine hasn't been). What if I blamed my mother for "making me" what I am by her behavior? What would be the use of it, except to foment anger and bitterness she never deserved, because it was never "her fault." She might have preferred a girl, but I know she loved me anyway, so no problem with that. Had I been born drug-addicted or with fetal alcohol syndrome, I suppose I might have blamed her for that, but none of that was remotely true. Genes, on the other hand, we have no control over. So I'm far happier to say, with Popeye the Sailor Man: "I Yam what I Yam." I was born this way. And that's enough for me.
