"Normal", Amy Bloom's new book, contains a longer version of her essay entitled "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses," published earlier this year in the Atlantic Monthly. That article focused on heterosexual crossdressers in general and in part on Triess, our former parent organization, the Society of the Second Self. The book also contains chapters on Female-to-Male transsexuals and on people dealing with intersexual conditions. The chapter on Female-to-Male transsexuals is essentially the same as an article published eight years ago, while the material on intersexual issues with the medical profession’s actions is new. I found those chapters, two thirds of the book, unexceptional. But the chapter dealing with heterosexual crossdressing remains controversial in its expanded form.

I’d like to examine how Bloom’s argument is constructed and to what extent it contains truth. Recently, Bloom was interviewed by Robert Birnbaum on the webzine "Identity Theory". Two remarks in that interview have helped me understand exactly what I needed to say about "Normal". Birnbaum asked Bloom about feedback to the original Atlantic Monthly article. Bloom described a variety of responses:

I originally had a good impression, and thought that the article was tough but fair. I  posted a transcription of the article on a website I manage and encouraged other crossdressers to read it and reflect on their own conduct. But, with the passage of time, while Bloom’s observations stand on their own, reading and re-reading revealed what I regard as deceptive treatment not only of the subjects, but the reader. This is something no one has taken Bloom to task for yet.

Both I and my partner felt on reading the magazine article, that Bloom was less concerned with crossdressing than she was about the institution of traditional heterosexual marriage. In the preface to "Normal" Bloom herself confirms that suspicion:

What does Bloom learn about heterosexual marriage? Bloom asserts at the end of her essay that it is a form of oppression of women, a well-known radical feminist argument. She sets this argument up in two parts. Part one is that crossdressing is a form of spouse abuse akin to violence. She compares the heterosexual CDs she has met to one of the more famous literary wife-beaters:

You can’t, of course, set Bill Sykes’ sadism aside. That was his calling card. Bill Sykes without his sadism isn’t Bill Sykes. It’s a devious literary device to pretend to commit that kind of character surgery knowing full well that the audience will not ignore Bill’s repeated beating of Nancy. To posit that the sentence isn’t equally about Bill and Nancy and is really only about Nancy’s behavior is simply wrong.

The outcome for the wives she met, and the second part of the argument is, and by inference for all wives, that "they try to make the marriage work, and if the price of a good provider and a decent man is not much sex and a certain amount of constant pain, it is not an unfamiliar bargain…[ ..] .otherwise just as they have told me all along, they are just like everyone else.

Unless marriage as an institution requires the degradation of women in exchange for a decent provider and not much sex, then marriages of Bloom’s sample of crossdressers can’t be like everyone else’s. But if they’re not like everyone else, then they can’t be "Normal" and Bloom has to find some other cover for her Olympian judgments, and shortens her book by one third.

Bloom pulls off another sneak attack in this last remark. In the entire article she has not mentioned the sex lives of the women she’s met (or the crossdressers for that matter). Not much sex? Where did that come from? In a High School English class this stealthy insertion of an unsupported conclusion at the end of the essay would be marked in red, and points deducted.

I’d like to return at this point to the second revelation found in Birnbaum’s interview. Bloom discusses her emphasis on TriEss:

Amy: The other thing that I try to make it clear in the book more than in the magazine that there are plenty of heterosexual cross dressers who are not oriented towards family values, who don't define themselves that way and who are not exclusive. And who are happy to include gay cross dressers, bisexual cross dressers. They don't care. The particular group [TriEss] that I focused on had a more conservative bent.

I find these remarks peculiar and revealing. Bloom prefers the exotic to the ordinary. She ignores the concerns that the same wives she claimed to empathize with have about crossdressing husbands turning out to be gay or transsexual. She misses the point about TriEss trying (no matter how poorly it does the job), trying to provide a supportive context for couples to stay married, to support the crossdresser and the spouse and the children. She doesn’t approach the question of what kind of support for wives or families is available through those "open" groups. Wives I know consistently express concern about peer pressure in open groups, and especially the bar scene, leading to adulterous sexual experimentation, and self-fulfilling prophesies of transsexualism, wherein a community enables its dysfunctional members in a steady march towards hormones and surgery with little or no contact with the real world. On the other hand, if heterosexual marriage isn’t your cup of tea, then perhaps it’s not an oversight that Bloom doesn’t consider how good a job the open groups do, or whether their members (and spouses if there are any) are more or less happy than the TriEss members and their spouses.

Maybe as an out lesbian, Bloom feels that all heterosexual marriages are sexually unfulfilling for women. Perhaps Bloom really believes that her sample crossdressers’ marriages are just like any other heterosexual marriage. If so, that says more about Bloom than it does the institution of marriage or crossdressers. Whether Bloom’s animus against heterosexual marriage came before or after seeing the couples with a crossdressing husband is something for Bloom herself to consider. But she might as well have had that conclusion to begin with, and then structured a paper to that point given what she ended up with.

Marriage isn’t the only topic Bloom deals with. Bloom attempts to explore and relate the psychiatric perspective. One of Bloom’s most controversial choices is the use of Dr. Ray Blanchard of Canada’s Clarke Institute in Toronto as an expert source. In fact, Blanchard seems to be the only expert she consults. To the uninitiated Bloom has merely chosen an expert who provides experienced insight into the world of heterosexual male crossdressing. To people in the "gender" community however, citing Blanchard is evidence of hostile intent.

Blanchard’s research into sexology brought him to the conclusion that male to female transsexuals are not driven to their hormonal and surgical interventions by alienation brought on by a conflict between their sense of gender identity, desired social role and their body. Instead Blanchard believes that only a warped sexual drive can explain the phenomena, not the conventional views. His research in the early 1990s divided Male to Female transsexuals into two categories. One was those who desired sex with men, generally young gay "males" who sought reassignment early in life. The other was those who desired sex not so much with women but who wanted to have women’s sex organs and/or role while having sex, a syndrome he named "autogynephilia" commonly abbreviated AGP. Victims of AGP generally transitioned later in life, often after having successful careers, apparently successful marriages and having fathered children. Transsexual surgery is, from this viewpoint the only "cure" for the social side effects of a certain kind of pathologically deviant sexual drive. This drive produced corollary dystonic symptoms such as depression that could be ameliorated by transsexual surgery. Blanchard further antagonized the trans community by his reputed insistence that anyone who denied erotic motivation was lying.

The critiques of Blanchard are numerous, and the ideas bear greatly on what we can understand about Bloom’s use of him as an authority. One of the primary criticisms has to do with the self-selected nature of his sample, and the problem that there is no good evidence that the people in the sample were actually transsexuals or even representative of the larger population. Blanchard’s data is based on people coming to his clinic in need of help with gender issues. This is not a random sample of people. We don’t know how many actually completed the process of transsexual surgery. Many activists regard Blanchard as willfully confusing transsexuals with fetishistic transvestites. Crossdressers in turn respond that only those people who experienced great difficulties presented themselves to Blanchard’s clinic, while the vast majority who coped and thrived without Blanchard’s dubious services weren’t counted in the sample. Still Blanchard has his defenders and there are people who openly acknowledge that their motivation for sexual reassignment surgery was at least in part to fulfill their sexual fantasies. The question though isn’t whether Blanchard observed something true, but the how significant that truth is.

Dr. Virginia Erhardt, a well-known therapist serving transgendered clients and their families puts it this way: "I would hope that at the very least, all transsexual women find it a little tiny bit arousing to engage in or imagine themselves engaging in erotic activity as women. If they don't, aren't they missing some of the delight in life?" If you try to imagine a transsexual without any erotic ideation at all, or normal male eros maps (whatever that may be) the notion is just as perverse as Blanchard’s allegation of paraphilia in hyperdrive. Exactly what level and kind of sexual imagery would Blanchard accept as non-paraphilic for a candidate for transsexual surgery? No one knows. I would hope the Erhardt’s remark would be taken to read that some sense of eroticism is permitted to crossdressers as well without it being deemed automatically pathological.

My favorite overlooked point of view comes from rolling back the clock to before puberty, when sexuality becomes insistent. If you have a physically male child who identifies with girls, who wishes (him)self female, whether (he) has the resources to mask (his) longings and appear to conform or whether (he) is flamboyantly out about them, why would you expect this child to develop mainline erotic ideation, whatever that is? If you start with the idea of transgender as a normal variation, you come to very different conclusions about what constitutes healthy adaptation than from using pathology as the starting point. Since all Blanchard sees at his clinic are people who are very unhappy about their lives, people who experience dysfunction and pathology, how can he have any idea what is going on with the people who aren’t coming to the clinic? Didn’t we go through all this when homosexuality was kicked out of the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, and hence removed from the realm of pathology?

[It used to be that homosexuality was regarded as a mental disorder, and that the problems experienced by homosexuals were the result of their sexual orientation. Current thinking is that whatever dysfunction is experienced by some homosexuals is the result of social intolerance and the anxiety that produces. What changed the psychiatric establishment’s view of homosexuality was the revelation that there were large numbers of homosexuals living happy, healthy and productive lives who had been invisible to psychiatric practice, making it obvious that homosexual practice in and of itself could not be dysfunctional.]

These last two points bring us to the key quotes of Blanchard that Bloom chose to present. Blanchard says "Crossdresser’s desires do not map onto anything in our world…You will never know how they feel unless you are one of them". There is a nasty implicit assumption hidden in this remark, the assumption that any of us knows how another person feels, has desires the same as someone else. Men and women have been baffled by each other’s desires as long as we have recorded this sort of thing. Within the sexes is there any true understanding or do we merely have conventions about it broadcast on the mass media? That real men are turned on by the Playboy centerfold? That real women are turned on by Harlequin Romance novels? Does a heterosexual man understand what a gay man sees in another man? What then is exceptional about not relating to crossdresser’s desires? In a word, nothing. The argument is a cruel red herring. It turns the focus from a crossdresser’s place in the world, that is his normality to his unspeakable desires, that is his deviance. And then Bloom slams down the hammer:

What an amazingly heterosexist thing to say! Accept Bloom’s assertion for a moment (despite her quoting Blanchard to opposite effect, see below). The fault lies not with the observer, but with the observed! That male-female couple holding hands isn’t satisfying a lust in your presence? Even by your presence? In some cultures the mullahs regard such simple public displays of affection as exhibitionist violations of the moral order. How does Bloom feel about her personal problem of holding hands in public with her beloved, Joy Johannsen? Drag Queens make sense to Bloom so she doesn’t seem to worry about them satisfying their lust in her presence. Or transmen like Loren Cameron, or any gay or lesbian she knows.

Bloom in essence claims that crossdressers are sexual predators, going out in public to commit visual frotteurism. But very few crossdressers actually go out in anything like public. The vast majority of crossdressers and most especially the sexual crossdressers go no further than their bedroom mirror. The next segment manages to get to support groups, "Dignity" cruises and the like. They are scarcely exposed to the general public. They don’t loiter around malls or grocery stores as if they were eager pedophiles hanging around schoolyards. There is the large "t-girl" segment, but they confine their activities to the demi-monde of gay clubs. The chances of Jane Q. Public being visually assaulted by a thrill seeking crossdressed man are insignificant provided she doesn’t watch the daytime television scandal shows. The majority of ones who go out in public, from my experience simply want to be, for a few hours, seen as women in the eyes of the world….very much like male to female transsexuals, but not full time. If Ms. Bloom felt assaulted by the gleam in certain crossdressers’ eyes, it is only because she chose to venture into the world of those crossdressers, not because she ran into one while out shopping or finding one in her otherwise female kaffe-klatsch.

{Frotteurism is the practice of surreptitiously rubbing genitals on the unsuspecting and non-consenting passerby, say for example in a crowded bus or subway.]

Bloom quotes Blanchard in an interesting and revealing way on this point: "Even when the sexual spark, the libido fades, the attachment and the need persist. Like in marriage". So is Bloom contradicting Blanchard? That the spark doesn’t fade, the gleam is always there? Bloom again returns to her interest in marriage, conventional marriage. But here Blanchard backs up a major claim of TriEss, that while the practice may have sexual roots, for its members the libido is generally a thing of the past. If Ms. Bloom saw the gleam in the eyes, it’s because she set herself up to prowl among people for whom it hadn’t faded. On the other hand, given her somewhat smug and matter of fact approval of transgressive lifestyles, perhaps fading of libido would also be damning evidence of some other "pathology." Writing about the people for whom crossdressing didn’t produce a gleam in the eye certainly wouldn’t be titillating, or sell books or magazines.

Bloom does not, in fact, report on the sexuality, or sexual practices of the people she interviews. The question, "well, what do they do in bed?" is pervasive and unresolved. What little information is provided comes from Blanchard. When Blanchard claims that crossdressers wish that their penis belonged to their wife, what is that claim based on? TriEss members, or patients with severe dysfunction in his clinic? Is this an occasional erotic fantasy like having sex with a cheerleader (or conversely the quarterback), or an obligatory sexual ritual? Do wives (at least wives who have a basis for comparison) experience sex with their crossdresser husbands as if they were mere objects in a ritual fantasy, or as beloved partners? For that matter, exactly what do we know about what is going on in the minds of supposedly "normal" men (or women) during intercourse? Is this one of those things "everyone knows" that turns out to be in truth something nobody really knows at all?

This is a strange pass to be at when reading a book entitled "Normal". I don’t think that readers of Bloom’s book will conclude that heterosexual crossdressers are either normal, or particularly good or nice people. Their wives, maybe, but not the crossdressers. How did Bloom stray so far from her original intentions? Bloom made such a brave start of things, quoting Jeremy Bentham to great effect at the front of her preface:

Jeremy Bentham

Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)

But what is Blanchard, Bloom’s primary authoritative clinical source saying if not "I don’t practice it, so it’s unnatural (pathological)"? Blanchard on the idea of a guy relaxing in a dress:

Where is the appreciation of normal, natural variation in this exposition? Nowhere to be found! I can’t relax in a full lotus position, my knees won’t take it, but my partner can relax that way just fine. As far as this goes we’re both normal. Some people relax by skydiving or watching boxing. I could deem these pastimes unnatural and repugnant. But that’s what natural variation is all about.

Blanchard is quoted, "it’s like they plug in the lamp and the toaster pops up. They emulate the women they want to have- some kind of confusion between attraction to the sexual object and being the sexual object. Many see an attractive woman, get aroused and then envious. They cannot get their wires uncrossed."

Accepting for a moment Blanchard’s rationalization, crossed wires sounds like pathology, not nature’s variety. But here it’s more than pathology, it’s moral failure, because "they cannot get their wires uncrossed" will be read by most people to indicate that "they" have responsibility for the condition- as opposed to a neutral phrasing of "the wires cannot be uncrossed". Where is similar treatment of the female-to-male transsexual in that essay? Where does Bloom shine the light of skepticism on the claim for autonomy and agency on the part of those born intersexed? As for whom it is that crossdressers emulate: Yes, observably many play with elements of projected female desire. Short skirts and pseudo décolletage that aren’t appropriate for their age are often seen. But many emulate not women they desire, but women they admire- a notion Blanchard seems ignorant of. Whatever they may choose at one time, that may not be what they choose in 5 years.

Bloom carries Blanchard’s rationalization further, borrowing from Dr. Anne Lawrence the notion of "men trapped in men’s bodies". This phrase was coined by Lawrence to apply to the history of self-confessed autogynephilic transsexuals such as herself. While not the first to do so, Bloom innovates and appropriates to apply this notion to crossdressers. Bloom trades on the naiveté of the audience not to know the original contexts to accomplish this leap. But other than appropriation and insinuation, Bloom doesn’t support this contention. No crossdresser is quoted as identifying with that phrase, unlike numerous examples that Lawrence provides for transsexuals.

Another of Blanchard’s ideas is that "All these men will tell you, "I had to hide my femininity, I became a cop, a firefighter, a black belt in Karate, a construction worker in order to compensate, in order to put these fears to rest and hide my true nature.’"

It is clear that Blanchard, as Bloom presents him, distrusts to the point of ridicule the narratives he has heard. He thinks men fear exposure of their crossdressing, not their femininity. While it is certainly true that for good and rational reasons men who crossdress fear exposure, it is just as true that signs of femininity in men are treated harshly in our culture (among others). Men are held to a standard of masculinity only achieved by John Wayne when enacting a movie script. Boys don’t cry, right? Why is it inappropriate for a boy to cry? What happens to boys who cry? All of this makes you want to send Blanchard to a corner for a good long time-out. Why does Blanchard find it necessary to deny one truth in order to assert another? And why does Bloom passively accept this argument?

When Blanchard asserts the past gets re-written…how does he know? If I told him of playing jacks with the girls, of school projects with girls, of costumes that contrived to get me in skirts when overt dressing was too dangerous, of years of gossiping in the kitchen with our neighbor’s daughter and her mother, is he going to pull on his metaphorical Freudian beard and call me a liar? Perhaps.

Still, I share his distrust of narratives. Stories of being girlish where the sole expression is the desire for clothing make me nervous. Claims that it’s not about sex made by someone dressed like a hooker do not ring true to me. Ex-combat pilots who prefer to hang around with the guys at a TriEss meeting while the wives are cleaning up in the kitchen don’t impress me with assertions of femininity. The stigma associated with "trans" means that there is always incentive for individuals to reshape their narratives to fit whatever stories create more social acceptance. After a while, people will become to believe that the expropriated elements of their story are true.

So what have we really learned about heterosexual crossdressers? For all of Bloom relying on Blanchard’s jaundiced advice, and her use of crossdressers’ marriages as a metaphor for heterosexual marriage in a patriarchal society we are still left with her observations.

It’s hard to ignore Peggy Rudd, author, wife of a CD and widely known female apologist for crossdressers, saying that the crossdressers have far more fun than the spouses do. Bloom’s embarrassed admission that she finds Mel(anie) more fun than Peggy is a surprisingly candid and painful observation. It’s also hard to reconcile this observation with the spouses of CD’s and Ms. Bloom drinking, shaking booty and having a good time after the crossdressed beauty contestants who can’t or won’t dance retire to their bedrooms. I wonder if Bloom herself noted the contradiction? And how did she reconcile the fact that this particular event had nothing to do with TriEss and SPICE. Although Bloom credits SPICE as a source of information, she never actually attends a SPICE meeting. Her observations of spouses on a "Dignity Cruise" are neither representative of a local chapter meeting nor a SPICE meeting. Virgina Erhardt, previously mentioned above, decries Bloom’s characterization of the women of SPICE. Erhardt sees women of strength, not doormats, and people who have retained or created their own spaces and satisfactions in life, not victims of their husband’s "compulsions". Is "victim" is the preferred equivalent to "normal" in Ms. Bloom’s lexicon?

It’s hard to ignore the pain and discontent of the wife of a crossdressing Southern Baptist minister. It’s hard to ignore the goings on Bloom reports at Fantasia Faire or Fall Harvest.

When Bloom helps make up a contestant at the Fall Harvest pageant, it’s hard to ignore how much fun he is having, until his wife shows up. Bloom’s role in helping that person leads directly to an overlooked topic in the crossdressing community. Bloom nailed it in the very first paragraph of the chapter:

The confusion of the acceptance born of the exchange of money isn’t just a problem for heterosexual CDs. Women who use the same services have expressed mixed emotions on the connections they make with hairdressers, nail technicians, make up artists and other sales people. But women almost inevitably have a coterie of female friends with whom they share their lives. The limited context of the commercial relationships available to most crossdressers shows too clearly the limits enforced by society, and I regret to say the personal limitations of so many crossdressers themselves. An exploration of the relationships of crossdressers with men would require another essay, but it is worth considering that while crossdressing can appear to remove and defuse customary sexual tension between the crossdressed man and women, it injects that problem into the relationship between a crossdressed man and men, with ensuing concerns about homosexual attraction.

It’s hard to ignore that overall Female-to-Male transsexuals, and the intersexed reformers make sense to Bloom, whereas heterosexual crossdressers don’t. Nature may be varied to Bloom, but virtue is absolute. It’s hard to place a context on this because Bloom never really says what she means by the word normal. That’s rather astonishing when you consider that "NORMAL" is the name of the book. Murder is normal, meaning it is expected in human populations, tragic though it be. If heterosexual crossdressing is normal as murder is normal then Bloom has proved her point easily. What Bloom claims, without really demonstrating it, is that the marriages of heterosexual crossdressers are the same bad deal for women that heterosexual marriages are without crossdressing involved. Bloom never surveys heterosexual marriage to show that the stresses and strains of those marriages are the same as those in a CD marriage, she just decides they are. FtM transsexuals and FtM activists are normalized as good guys, heterosexual crossdressers are normalized as bad guys, like wife beaters, bank robbers and murderers. We may detest them, but they’ll always be around. If this is normal, who wants to be normal?

Of course this is also all nonsense. Bloom generalizes about all heterosexual CDs based on a rather peculiar sample of people. The bad, strange behavior Bloom has witnessed I’ve seen also. But I’ve also seen a lot of healthy people having a good time, and not taking their cross dressing desires too seriously. Bloom acknowledges that the healthy adaptive people she met didn’t get airtime in her writing. I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing she had given them more space, and at the very least learned what Blanchard’s critics have to say. It’s hard enough to be a cross-dresser without having to deconstruct Bloom’s essay every time you meet someone who has read it.

Diane Sofia Frank is Director of Communications and Web Mistress and for the Alpha Omega Society.  She lives in the greater Cleveland area with her spouse of 26 years, and both are happy in the marriage.