Stolen this and put some of my own slant on it.. need to type stuff and get the current problems of the world out of my head...

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 and perverse.

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. Why? I'm successful like may of us and a leader of men and women and someone people look up to and I crossdress but it does at some stage make you feel some sort of failure... But get over it you're not a failure for crossdressing that's just years and years of social conditioning bullshit!!

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 and I'm telling you for the most part this is absolute bullshit. I've chatted to enough men who crossdress now over the years to know this to be nonsense.

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. This sums it up nicely I love women and love the female image and love female fashion damn i love how i look and feel when i crossdress.

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.

We should accept that the adult cross-dresser is no different to anyone dressing up.. cos-play and kids dressing up is no different to an adults desire to dress up and escape for a while.

We want to inhabit the experiences of a group of people we're is keen on.

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

We may extend to admiring ourselves 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.

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

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.

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’.

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

I'm normal, most people i chat to here are normal, married, hoping our wives or Gfs will accept this part of us.. we worry far too much about what others may think instead of just enjoying the time we have when we can crossdress.

Who cares why we do it ... WE DO IT!

Davina