Last I checked, transgender people are considerably less than 1% of the population – there is no conversion, we are not a threat. These “naggling naybobs” just cannot abide the fact that we upset their tidy wee black and white notions of gender and sex. The problem lies within themselves and their inability to conceptualize a range of gray, not androgynous or trans people. I know this because when I was a young, hung-up & fearful young Catholic, sitting comfortably in a world I divided into black/white, right/wrong, on/0ff, I felt safe – Everything in its right place and the…
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But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed…
— Robert Burns, Tam O’ Shanter
Drinking again has been slipping back into my head lately. The first time I got plastered I was 3 finishing off the champagne glasses left unattended during the first dance at a wedding. I remember toddling from table to table thinking how brilliant I was to take advantage of the situation. At 9 and 10, when my parents were having parties, I’d sometimes sneak a pint-full of my dad’s brandy in an opaque plastic cup and nurse…
No red-blooded man is interested in appropriating female power — it is not a trade up to him.
On his radio program, Jeff Lewis, the reality TV personality and designer of Bravo TV infamy, recently spurned Mark Bryan, an American man in living in Germany who wears skirts and high heels to work and about town. You can find the Bryan online under various salacious headings like ‘Straight and happily married’ man wears skirts and heels to work to challenge gender norms. They made a point of bracketing Straight and happily married as if dubious of how he could be…
Not coming out, we often lie to our wives and the very people with whom we should be the most honest.
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You need to communicate through this. There are myriad motivations behind why men crossdress. In my case, it is something that was present in me from a very, very early age and I experience it as an integral part to the way I express and understand myself. I’d suggest three books: My Husband Betty and She’s not the Man I Married by Helen Boyd, a wife seeking to understand her husband’s crossdressing. …
For a long time it was absolute magic, a beautiful broken taboo blooming with fantasy where, in my imagination, I drew a bit closer to being the person I always wanted to be. When I dressed, I felt feminine and pretty, somehow less angry or at odds with the world, softened and comfortable. I felt something akin to the joy one feels when homesickness dissolves into the excitement of knowing you are nearly home. But as one weight lifted from me, it was replaced by a heaviness of heart that the feeling I got dressing wasn’t my reality 24/7. …
Invisible is how I would describe the feeling as I read a query online about whether there are ‘effeminate’ or ‘flamboyant’ straight men out there — I’m one, well maybe not terribly flamboyant… but the other, in many ways, feminine-of-center. On a personal level, I cringe every time I see the word ‘effeminate’ because I grew up hearing it used as a slight toward a man who didn’t measure up to some John Wayne ideal of manhood; ‘effeminate’ was a nicer way of saying ‘poof,’ ‘queer’ or ‘ f*g’ but the word still dripped with disdain. It sounds so old-fashioned now and laden with condemnation.
Feminine men, or those of us who dare to admire femininity with a degree of aspiration or envy, who have the confidence to look up to women as heroines and role-models are indeed out there. Some of us even like ‘girl things’ so much we show it in the way we dress and behave. I’ve often said that were I to wake up tomorrow and find I had somehow become a female version of myself, some of the logistical issues like identity papers and earning a living and buying a whole new wardrobe aside, I’d be quite happy for the…
