An article from the "School of Life" I search on line for these little tid-bits to add to our Forum from time to time the latest thinking and articles ... Have a read

Cross-dressing (and here we refer particularly to men dressing up as women) could hardly have a worse reputation.

The concept of a man taking pleasure in putting on a pair of stockings seems laughable, pitiful – and plain sinister.

"We assume a marriage would almost certainly break up the day a wife found her husband in her underwear; and that a manager would lose all authority if his colleagues knew about his enthusiasm for mascara and lipstick".

Cross-dressing seems like an admission of failure.

Instead of living up to an ideal of strength, ruggedness and sheer ‘normality’, a man keen to slip on a dress is taken to be a deviant of a particularly alarming sort.

But in truth, cross-dressing is grounded in a highly logical and universal desire: the wish to be, for a time, the gender one admires, is excited by – and perhaps loves. From Davina "This may also sound weird to a wife I know and sounds weird to me too as a Crossdresser but it is a logical thought as I love women, I love femininity.. I don't wish to be a woman but the closest I can be to being a woman is portraying one for a brief timeframe I know it still sounds weird doesn't it but read on"

Dressing like a woman is merely a dramatic, yet essentially reasonable, way of getting closer to the experiences of the sex one is profoundly curious about – and yet has been (somewhat arbitrarily) barred from.

We know cross-dressing well enough in other areas of life and there think nothing of it.

A five-year-old boy living in a suburb of Copenhagen who develops an interest in the lifestyle and attitudes of the cow herders of the Arizona plains would be heartily encouraged to dress up in a hat, jeans and waistcoat and aim his pistol at an imaginary Indian chief – so as to assuage his desire to get a little closer to the subject of his fascination. Davina "Been there done it had the cowboy hat, toy guns are up the attic as if I ever have a grandson or maybe a grandaughter in the future no doubt playing dress up, cowboys and indians (although i have a more educated view on the purge of the indigenous indian tribes in America now), playing army, playing super heroes etc is something I did as a kid... I even think my first foray around 6 dressing as Batman in black or grey opaque tights as that's what Adam West wore as Batman (looking back a rather Camp Batman.. I've become more the Christian Bale intense batman in my male persona) and asking my mother if she had blue tights so i could wear them to be superman (and she did or maybe bought them for me as too garish for her to ever wear out) was wearing these tights and loving the feel of them on my legs my first step towards crossdressing..... probably"

We should accept that the adult cross-dresser is no different.

Davina "Well it's a bit different as if that same boy was dressing up as a girl and not a cowboy society would deem that the parent step in and stop that habit wouldn't they and tell said little boy.. little boys don't dress as girls here have this cowboy hat and guns.." Some in society are changing their views on this and letting their children explore gender and I don't know how i feel about this.

He too wants to inhabit the experiences of a group of people he is keen on.

He seeks to know what it would be like to cross his legs in a tight cocktail dress, to walk across a marble floor in a pair of heels, to feel a grey cotton bra strap encasing his back, to put a little silver bracelet around his wrist, to feel the breeze on his bare waxed arms and to stroke his smooth long legs in the bath.

Davina "I don't know about all that, I just like the transformaiton, how i look and feel when i dress and like the clothing, the excitement of sexy matching lingerie, stockings and how they and tights feel on my legs and high heels and how they help shape my legs and sorry Esme wearing things I wish Esme would wear more often"

He might extend to imagining what it would be like to kiss a man as a woman, to feel bristles that are normally his on lips as soft as those of the lovers he has known.

Davina "Ahh I'm reading this now as I post it.. wrong wrong wrong wrong the writer is wrong here.. unless any of you dear readers imagine this? I certainly do not!! I can't think of anything worse than as Davina being kissed by a man puke eugghhhh no thankyou!!"

Admiring himself in the mirror in a pair of black tights, the cross dresser samples the intense, fascinating satisfaction of being simultaneously himself and the object of his desire.

Davina "Ahh back on track yes this is very true"

Though it may sound peculiar, in all this, the transvestite is only guided by the sort of questions that we otherwise admire greatly in the writing – and reading – of fiction.

What makes Anna Karenina moving is the intensity with which Tolstoy was able to imagine the experiences of a glamorous married woman in love with a handsome army officer.

To write Mansfield Park, Jane Austen had to learn how to dress up not only in the grey simple frocks of an impoverished sixteen-year-old schoolgirl (her heroine Fanny Price) but also the braided jackets of a middle-aged swaggering member of the aristocracy (Sir Thomas Bertram) and the black waistcoat of a sensitive would-be clergyman (Edmund Bertram).

The balding, heavily mustachioed Flaubert famously explained to his girlfriend Louise Colet that his heroine Emma Bovary had become for him more than a woman he was describing as a dispassionate observer of a fictional landscape: his identification with her was so total, he felt he had quite literally become her.

It was understandable, therefore, that he should have added to Louise that he had just masturbated at the idea of being Emma, lying back with her arms above her head, on a bed in a little hotel in Rouen, being powerfully penetrated by the local landowner Rodolphe.

Davina "Did thay all go over yall's heads he did what over what on the bed?" did the writer just flaunt their degree in English Lit at us? i prefer Sci fi books to someone being powerfully penetrated by the local landowner.. sheeesh.. but I've seen some of the books you ladies read on your kindles and it's not far off that and you think we're perverts shame on you lol... bet you watched and read Bridgerton just for the good acting too didn't cha?"

Transvestism is a way of tapping into our birthright of universal citizenship: it’s the most dramatic protest against being imaginatively bounded by the particular gender-province we happen to have been born into.

Davina "I'm not so sure about the birthright thing as ladies i bet youre screaming YOUR BIRTHRIGHT!! THAT's OUR BIRTHRIGHT!!"

Crossdressing enacts the great philosophical principle expressed by the Roman playwright, Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto: I am human, nothing human (including mini skirts or a hair band) is alien to me.

Davina "Hold on you mean to tell me mini skirts were Roman and not made in the 60s? Damn another thing to add to what did the Romans ever do for us"

It may of course be a bit disturbing to sense that one is really not so firmly anchored to the gender one was born into.

Davina "Oh I'm anchored into being a man alright but I have this escapism hobby which keeps me sane"

It may be bewildering to have to accept that one is at heart, in the semi-conscious mind, always going to be something far more diverse, multi-faceted but also perhaps interesting than a mere ‘man’ or a ‘woman’.

Davina "I do think it makes us men who crossdress more open minded and unique but we also put ourselves through the mill of shame and guilt on top of the stress of work and being the family man etc etc!

We shouldn’t be scared.

Across a range of important fields of life, we can accept that our original identity and status shouldn’t be regarded as decisive; and know the value of extending our sympathies through art, travel and the work of the imagination.

The transvestite is doing nothing more than practicing some basic empathetic moves with which we are already very comfortable in many areas.

Davina "I hate the word transvestite and i don't know why, corssdresser, t-girl yep label me those by tranny or transvestite is too mocking, derogatory or clinical for my liking"

Although we haven’t fully recognised it yet, cross-dressing is a very normal thing to do.

Davina "It is normal to us, but not to our wives and I had no idea where this article was going and doesn't really do it for me but worth adding here as another point of view without really a final point of any clarity to persuade us that crossdressing is a very normal thing to do and with some sexual undertones in part which aren't there for all crossdressers... the mention of kissing a guy and masturbating .. why's that even in the context of crossdressing? it's not sexuality based it doesn't have to be a sexual angle to why we crossdress.. Ok during our Crossdressing careers for want of a better word we can't deny a feeling of sexiness and being turned on sometimes by what we're doing but hands up if you've ever thought of kissing a dude when youre crossdressed uh uh no way no thankyou.. but have you masturbated when crossdressed? 😳😱 don't you know you can go blind doing that sort of thing 🤓 oops.

To sum up it's another article it's not very scientific or thorough in its assessment of crossdressing and maybe not very helpful and I don't think it's written by someone with experience of crossdressing.. however i do think it's getting more accepted very slowly and i think there are more of us than we realise to some degree on the Trans spectrum although we're still down the bottom of the rung in terms of that acceptance but climbing slowly.. and we have a nice group of people here who realise more and more why we crossdress and the strange benefits of it to our mental health and more partners who are supporting and some tolerating this side to us.

Davina