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A book review by Alpha Omega Society member, Diane Frank.
A rebuttal by Nancy Nageroni of Gender Talk Radio. And yet more comments: Nangeroni Yvonne's Place Rho Tau More on Bloom CONSERVATIVE MEN IN CONSERVATIVE DRESSES The world of cross-dressers is for the most part a world of traditional men, traditional marriages, and truths turned inside out. By Amy Bloom From
the Atlantic Monthly, April 2002 Heterosexual
cross-dressers bother almost everyone. Gay people regard them with disdain or
affectionate incomprehension, something warmer than tolerance but not much.
Transsexuals regard them as men "settling" for cross-dressing
because they don't have the courage to act on their transsexual longing, or
else as closeted and so homophobic that they prefer wearing a dress to facing
their desire for another man. Other straight men tend to find them funny or
sad, and some find them enraging. The only people on whose kindness and
sympathy crossdressers can rely are women: their wives and, even more
dependably, their hairdressers, their salespeople, their photographers and
makeup artists, their electrolysists, their therapists, and their friends. Drag
queens make sense to most of us. They represent a congruence of sexual
orientation, appearance, and temperament—feminine gay men dressing as women
for a career, like RuPaul, or, less lucratively, for prostitution, or to
express their sense of theater and femininity. (Barney Frank as a drag queen
makes no more sense, intuitively, than Dick Cheney as one.) Actors whose most
famous performance is as a female—from Barry Humphries, with his brilliant
and textured Dame Edna, to Flip Wilson, with his one-note gag of
Geraldine—don't puzzle us. Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire and the boys in Some
Like It Hot don't puzzle us; they're just men doing what they have to do to
survive, learning a nice lesson about the travails of womanhood, and giving
one on the benign uses of masculine self-esteem. Even the cross-dressing women
of history, women from many countries and every century since the ancient
Greeks—from Joan of Arc to Pope Joan to America's jazz-playing Billy Tipton,
from Little Jo Monaghan, the cowpoke, to Disney's adorable Mulan—don't
puzzle us, they chose to live as men because they couldn't otherwise have the
lives they wanted. Heterosexual
cross-dressers—straight men who have not only a wish but a need to wear
women's clothes and accessories—manage to be marginal among heterosexual
men, marginal among other men who wear women's clothes, marginal in the
community of sexual minorities, and completely acceptable only to fetishists,
who take anyone who claims to belong. Gay men do not say, "Oh, you're a
straight man who likes to wear a dress? Welcome aboard" Straight men do
not say, "Well, except for the dress thing, you're just like me. Howdy,
partner" Even in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where cross-dressers hold
their annual fall Fantasia Fair, few of the residents, gay or straight, seem
to recognize these men as people with whom they have a lot in common. Many
heterosexual cross-dressers never come out of the closet, not even to their
wives. Others tel1 their wives after ten or twenty or thirty years of
marriage, sometimes because they've been caught wearing their wives' clothes,
sometimes because the clothes have been discovered. the revelation that a man
himself is the "other woman" is a staple of crossdresser histories.)
Heterosexual cross-dressers often spend their whole adult lives ordering size
20 cocktail dresses from catalogues and dressing in secret, with only the
mirror for company. But lots of these men, driven by loneliness, by unmet
narcissistic needs (all dressed up and nowhere to go), by risk-taking impulses
(it's not hard to grasp that a fortyfive-year-old 240-pound former Marine
strolling through the Mall of America in full drag is consciously courting
risk), want to cross-dress outside their bedrooms. Engineers and accountants,
truck drivers and computer programmers, disproportionately represented among
the retired military, predominately Christian and predominately conservative
(far more moderate Republicans than liberal Democrats), these men go to
get-togethers in
Sometimes
the wives wish to come, to support their husbands and to enjoy the trip, or to
hang out with other wives, like golf widows or wives in Al-Anon. Some come
because their husbands need them to. "I don't mind, but really, if he
could learn to do his makeup properly and fasten his own bra, I'd rather stay
home" one woman told me at Fall Harvest 2000. (Later she called to say
that she had bought her husband a video guide to makeup for men and a
magnifying mirror, and that she was resigning as his dresser. "He can ask
one of the other guys to hook his bra,' she said.) Happy wives are everyone's
favorites, but happy or cowed, enthusiastic or grimly accepting, the wives at
these functions are simultaneously objects of much public appreciation and
utterly secondary to the men's business. The world of crossdressers is for the
most part a world of traditional men, traditional marriages, and truths turned
inside out. Reliable
statistics about the number of heterosexual cross-dressers don't seem to exist
In the fall of 2000 I spent several weeks trying to pin down that number. I
checked with the Intemational Foundation for Gender Education, in I
called Ray Blanchard, the head of clinical sexology services at
I checked with Jane Ellen and Frances Fairfax, of Tri-Eess, the Society for the
Second Self, "an international support and social organization for
Heterosexual Crossdressers, their spouses, partners, children and
friends" The Fairfaxes live in Texas, where Jane Ellen is otherwise a
physician and the father of three boys, two in college and one in prep school.
The "Maybe
three or four million" Jane Ellen hazarded.
"Maybe
somewhere between three and five percent of the adult [male] population.
People who claim it's more— I think that's just, you know, a minority
wanting to be bigger than it is. And people who say more like one or two
percent—I think those are the ones who are ashamed." When I asked Ray
Blanchard for an estimate, he agreed that three to five percent sounded about
right. There
are really only two points of agreement between Blanchard and the Fairfaxes:
that no one knows how many heterosexual cross-dressers there are, and that all
these men in dresses who assert that they are straight, sometimes to the point
of annoyance, are straight. JANE
ELLEN: A MAN WITH A Tri-Ess
was founded in 1976, as a melding of several cross-dressing groups, including
the historic Hose and Heels Club,
which began meeting in Califomia, in 1961, and which is to many cross-dressers
what Stonewall is to gay men: the beginning of the end of shame (although not,
for the cross-dressers, the end of fiercely preserved anonymity). The
Jane Ellen is a man with a mission: to save crossdressers from their worst selves
and to preserve their marriages.
Most [cross-dressers] are ordinary men who have discovered a feminine aspect to
their personalities, and desire to transcend the narrow stereotypes mandated
by conventional society. Happy in their masculinity, they have simply
discovered a feminine gender "gift" and decided to explore it ...
There is within each man a set of personality potentials that are part of his
birthright, but that society labels as "feminine" and says he should
suppress. Crossdressers have made contact with these potentials and found
their expression fulfilling. Integrating these into their whole personalities,
crossdressers are able to smooth off some of the macho rough edges programmed
by their upbringing. The result is a healthier whole person. The
Fairfaxes believe that heterosexual cross-dressers are just normal folks, not
at all like those gender outlaws— bearded men in dresses, "chicks with
dicks~—whom Jane Ellen calls "gender mockers" The Fairfaxes want
crossdressers out of the closet, not because Tri-Ess wishes to defy or upend
society, but because they believe that if society understood how normal
cross-dressing is, resistance to it would vanish; it would be seen as no
stranger a form of relaxation than golf. The words that Ray Blanchard uses
when he talks about cross-dressing—"fetish" "continuum of
gender dysphoria,' "narcissism,' "erotic self-absorption"—
are words the "Of
course it's not relaxing," Blanchard says, with some heat. "Heels
and makeup and a wig and a corset? It's preposterous. Even women don't find
that relaxing. Relaxing is a pair of sweatpants, clothing that doesn't even
feel like clothing. Cross-dressers want to normalize this, to have it seen as
relaxation and self-expression. I've had people say to me, 'You know, I bet if
there wasn't all this stereotyping, these people would not choose to wear a
dress2 I say that's nonsense. Cross-dressing is an attempt to resolve an
internal conflict, and it's not about fabric. If we had clothing for men and
women that was identical in every way except men wore shirts with four buttons
and women had shirts with five, cross-dressers would want more than anything
to have the shirt with five. We don't know why" Our
categories and descriptions are so narrow and self-protective that we don't
have words for the drive to crossdress, we don't have any language to describe
the mixture of attraction and envy that often leads these men to have sex with
women while thinking of themselves as male lesbians. A
brochure from the Fantasia Fair of l9S6 encapsulates the cross-dresser's bind
as he tries to describe what drives him. What
is a Crossdresser? An
individual, usually heterosexual, who desires and needs to dress in the
clothing of the opposite sex at different times throughout his or her life.
This compulsive behavior generally starts at a young age and the individual
struggles alone for many years with this closeted need. Crossdressing is not a
sickness, but represents a person who enjoys expressing another aspect of his
personality and
gains both emotional and physical pleasure from this transition. It is not a
hobby, but a necessity and Crossdressing is for life. This
seems to me to be the heart of cross-dressers' dilemma, and the heart of mine
in writing about them. Cross-dressing is a compulsion, but we must not see it
as a sickness. A good wife should tolerate it because the man has no choice,
but it isn't too hard to tolerate because it's a gift. It is about fun and
pleasure—and it's a necessity. The necessity of cross-dressing is
frightening to the men and to their wives, and their wish to tame it, to
characterize it as a preference and a gift, is understandable. Jane
Ellen told me, "Men are stil1 being trained—well, you know, as Virginia
Prince [the founder of Tri-Ess, and one of the godmothers of cross-dressing]
says, 'Men are always trying to become what women are content to be"' 'What
is it that women are content to be?" I asked. "Oh,
you know, they know when to give it a rest. They know when and how to quit.
They can relax and be themselves" I
did know. He meant that in his vision, idealized and old-fashioned, women are
like oceans, or like fields, or like horses, and men are sailors, farmers, and
cowboys, and that is their curse
and that is women's blessing, although women may not realize it. It is
exhausting to be a man, and delightful to kick off those demands and slip into
something more comfortable. The longer I talked to the "A
lot of men, myself included, want to go there, to be a feminine self, to slow
down and stop striving," Jane Ellen told me. "It
sounds like yoga,' I replied. Jane
Ellen was silent. It sounds like yoga except for the two hours of preparation
time. It sounds like yoga except that it begins in a man's life as an erotic
response and becomes an erotic fetish. Sometimes I put on lipstick when I'm
tense. It makes me feel armored, less vulnerable to the world. That's not the
same thing. I don't feel that the lipstick is essential to my being, that
without it I must stay home, though I know that there is an erotic dimension
to getting dressed up (it's not just cross-dressers who appreciate the
silkiness of a slip, the slide of a stocking). When the dressing and the
garments are the fuel for and the expression of one's sexual wishes, it is
about sex, not gender. "Cross-dressers'
desires do not map onto anything in our world," Ray Blanchard says.
"You will never know how they feel if you are not one of them. And they
have to disconnect between reality and their fantasy. Otherwise their desires
are too disruptive. It's too disruptive to acknowledge that you wish your
penis was part of your wife's body and not yours. It's too disruptive to
acknowledge that this is a sexual compulsion" For
all their talk of relaxation, the LEVELS
OF JOY I
am aboard the Carnival ship I
waffle about what to wear for nearly half an hour. Finally I decide that silk
pants, a tank top, and sandals is right—for the level of dressiness of the
dinner (which I have overestimated) and for my own social and appearance
anxiety (which I have underestimated). When I walk into the party, the Rudds
hug me and introduce me as "Amy the writer" Some men flinch,
although the Rudds have told everyone to expect me. Tory, a good-looking young
man from I
mingle with the rest of the guys and their wives. These men, to whom I will
refer in print as "he,' and to whom I refer in person when they are
cross-dressed as "she,' are not drag queens, hardworking perennials like
Pearlene the Size Queen and Big-Boned Barbie, not Las Vegas female
impersonators, and most definitely not gender-benders of any kind—not
Marilyn Manson, not Prince. When cross-dressed, they look more like Mrs.
Attanas, my formidable fourth grade teacher, a big, tall woman with a
bolsterlike bosom, thick legs, sensible pumps, hennaed hair, and twin spots of
rouge on her cheeks. Like Jane Ellen Fairfax, they have the matronly look so
common to straight cross-dressers. At first I thought this reflected some
weird attachment to their mothers—that the image they wished to present was
that of their own first woman. Hence the heavy foundation, the blue eye
shadow, the big pearl-button earrings. I no longer think so. I've noticed the
same look among their wives, and among lots of middle-aged women not much
interested in changing fashions. These men are not regular readers of Elle,
Vogue, or even Ladies' Home Journal. I
have met cross-dressers whose presentation is just this side of Christina
Aguilera, and I have met a fifty-year old Midwestern engineer and a
sixty-year-old born-again Christian CEO and a forty-year-old police captain
who dress exactly as they would if they had been born on the distaff side, in
clothes both contemporary and appropriate, whether Gap or Escada or Dress
Barn. But though anatomy may not be destiny, it certainly lays a hand on our
options. Most cross-dressers, and almost all married cross-dressers, live
lives in which they are not cross-dressed. They don't take female hormones,
and they usually don't have electrolysis even if they would like to (many
express the wish to wake up and find themselves without facial arm, or leg
hair, but their wives are opposed). They cannot easily put together a natural
believable female appearance. First they need beard camouflage, to flatten and
disguise the stubble, then powder over that and foundation over that. Sweating
is a big problem. Jim Bridges, a transformation guide and guru, the creator of
the videos Bridges to Beauty 2000 and Hollywood Makeup Secrets, which are
offered at his boutique in North Hollywood and through his booming Web
business ("Can't tell you who in the House of Representatives, can't tell
you who in the NFL,' he told me while putting false eyelashes on a John Deere
salesman at Fall Harvest 2000), counsels a quick swipe of antiperspirant on
the upper lip and at the hairline. Cross-dressing is not only
anxiety-provoking and arousing, it is also warm under the wig, the corset, the
padding, the pantyhose. A pronounced face requires pronounced makeup, and
after the false eyelashes and even the subtlest contouring of the wider jaw
and the thick brow, one can look beautiful or ridiculous, but one cannot look
like most of the women around. At
dinner I am seated with the Rudds, wearing nearly matching floral prints. To
my right are Tory's aunt and cousin, who speak almost no English, and next to
them is Lori, a Lee Remick look alike, husband nowhere in sight. On the other
side of her is a man in his late sixties, recently retired as a senior partner
in a white-shoe law firm in the To
my left are Felicity and his wife. Felicity is a large, hunched man, made up
in a very conventional slightly stiff manner. He looks like a librarian, or
perhaps the strong-minded wife of a minister; in fact he is a Southern Baptist
minister from the very buckle of the Bible Belt. "So, you're the writer,
he says. "Well I'd say you pass pretty well: I smile pleasantly, as if I
am not offended, as if I don't think he intended to offend me. He clears his
throat twice and stares at my silk pants. "You gals just get to
cross-dress all the time and no one says boo" He sounds furious drat life
is so easy for me and so hard for him, but because he is a minister, and even
more because he is dressed as and representing someone named Felicity, he
cannot be direct or angry; he has to try to convey a serene and gracious
femininity regardless of his feelings. And his wife is beside herself,
tight-lipped hands clasped; she is a Christian woman doing what she must, and
though she might wish otherwise, she cannot be pleased. Felicity
and Marie, a large, sweet man on the other side of the table, take turns
dominating the dinner conversation. There is a great deal that they both want
me to understand and they are also gratified, painfully gratified, by my
attention, by the fact that I even think about them without horror. I come to
see why so many women find themselves sympathetic to cross-dressers: Women are
raised to be sympathetic, and protective toward the vulnerable, and there is
something sweet, unexpected, and powerful about being a woman and sympathize
with a man not because he demands it but because you genuinely feel sorry for
him, for his debilitating envy and his fear of discovery and his sense of
powerlessness to live as he wants. The supermodel Heidi Klum and her crowd may
feel sorry for helpless men, whipsawed by passion every night of the week, but
this is not a stance that society affords most women. Over
the next few days I meet most of the members of the Rudds' group. I meet a
couple who look alike whether he's crossdressed or not I meet a shy, skinny
engineer who attends the cruise talent show in a white stretch-velvet dress
and a platinum Tina Turner shag. I meet Harry, who is always somewhat
cross-dressed (women's jeans, women's sneakers) but never flamboyantly; his
appearance is that of an effeminate man, and he doesn't bother with a femme
name or seem to have any of the common need for a more feminine presentation.
I would have thought this would be easier for his wife than a husband who
called himself Lulu, spent hours in the bathroom making up his face, and
paraded around in a strapless lavender tulle dress and matching pumps, but
it's not. “I
love him," she tells me. 'I love him, but I don't want a man who is
excited by the idea of being a woman. We have two kids, he's a great dad a
good provider, but I want a man who's comfortable with masculinity. I don’t
want to be sisters ... or lesbians. If I wanted a woman, I would have found
one by now. But . . . other things are good" And he tells me, with great
sadness’’ she is the most supportive person in the world—and this is a
terrible thing for her. We work on it, we struggle" He stops and gathers
his defenses; throughout the cruise he will condescend to the men with femme
names, the men who insist on elaborate makeup, because he sees himself as
"evolved, free of the trappings and compulsions of cross-dressing.
"All couples struggle,' he says. "They fight about money, about sex.
You can't tell me they don't. This is no different" He looks out at the
ocean. "This is different, I know, but I refuse to let it ruin our
lives" Peggy
Rudd is the boss and the model for the wives, their spokesperson, a movement
spokesperson, and the cruise director. Mel (or Melanie, as he calls himself
when crossdressed), all hearty kindness, a genial grandfather even in a dress
and a bolero jacket, does not seem to have similar obligations. None of the
men say to me, "I've learned so much from Mel" He is a good old boy
in drag, always looking for a laugh, a little playful fun, another piece of
bread and butter under Peggy's watchful eye (the whole table knows of his
cholesterol troubles and hers). Although he does not make a pretty woman, he
makes a reasonably convincing overweight, coarse-featured sixty-year-old
woman, I think—but my eyes have adjusted: none of these guys look as tall or
as large to me as they are. One
evening Peggy says, with a slightly pursed expression, "My next book is
on joy: the difference between the level of joy that cross-dressers
experience"—she holds her hand up over her head—"and the level
of joy that their wives experience" Her hand drops to her waist. The
crossdressers around us say nothing. They nod, joyous astronauts sympathizing
with the poor wives left behind and trying not to show how much better a time
they are having. I think of the twinkle in Mel's eyes and the fact that
nothing like a twinkle ever appears in Peggy's. It must be psychologically
exhausting for her to turn this pain into a shared hobby, his compulsion into
entertainment, his need into an occasion for celebration, and I feel ashamed
that, knowing all that, I still prefer his company. Every
night the headwaiter becomes more and more camp and foolishly flattering;
these people are big tippers, moderate drinkers, considerate of the staff, and
extremely polite. On the third night of the cruise Felicity comes to dinner
"en drab" as they say, looking like what he is— a heavyset Baptist
minister who worked construction in his youth. With a flourish the headwaiter
delivers roses to his wife, to applause from our four tables. Felicity puts
his big hand on hers and squeezes it. He makes a toast to their thirty years
of marriage and to her goodness and support. He begins to choke up; her remote
look never changes. I can see that she is not pleased that he decided to dress
like a man for her tonight. She is not pleased that he is so grateful to her
for trying to believe that he cross-dresses only because he cannot express his
warm and nurturing self while wearing trousers. Nor is she pleased, God knows,
to sit with a bunch of men in makeup and dresses, some modest, some
outrageous, some passable, most not, and call it an anniversary party. Later
they come to talk to me, and when Felicity says that his path may be to
minister to the transgendered. his wife puts her hand over her mouth and says
quietly, "God will show us the way" She means, unmistakably, that
the way will surely not be this one—that God cannot want her to be the wife
of a cross-dresser who ministers to the transgendered. Felicity
says, "It's like there are three of me in this little boat: the husband,
the cross-dresser, and the minister. I can hear the falls approaching, and I
know, I know with all my heart, one of us will not survive this ride"
He begins to cry, and I get tears in my eyes. As I hand him some tissues, his
wife glares at me and says, "You sure do get involved with your
interviews". She must think that some pretty fancy footwork is required to
wind up so sorry for the crossdresser and not for the wife; when I look at her
sympathetically, she almost spits. Pity from people like me is not what she
wants either. For the remainder of the trip Felicity seeks me out and his wife
avoids me. THE
GLEAM IN THEIR EYES After
the cruise, after follow-up e-mails with Melanie and Peggy, and more phone
calls with the Fairfaxes, I found that I had more to say than I had thought,
and more concerns about saying it. I didn't want to demonize or pathologize
any sexual preference or behavior that doesn't hurt anyone. I didn't want to
make fun of fetishists. Now that our culture has begun to shift toward the
notion that no mature reciprocal love between two people, of the same or
opposite sex, is a disease, I didn't want to consign everyone who isn't just
gay or straight to the DSM junk pile. I wanted to focus on people like Steve
and Sue, happily married for more than thirty years and now often mistaken for
a lesbian couple, or like the well-adjusted state trooper from Montana, whose
John Wayne manner, walk, and wink never changed, even when he wore a
black-lace cocktail dress, even when his pretty wife sat on his lap and kissed
him, telling me, "That's just who he is. He's a fun person, a people
person, and I guess the cross-dressing is part of it". The men I met were
by and large decent, kind' intelligent, and willing to talk openly. Their
wives were the same, many of them under the additional pressure of having to
make the best accommodation they can to a marriage they did not envision and
do not prefer. But
I do think that passion for a person, or a capacity to love people, is
different from a sexual impulse that is directed toward an object or an act
and that is greater than the desire for any person. And although one could
argue that all desire focused on an object or even an act is a fetish, I don't
think so—any more than I think that gender-reassignment surgery (even when
it's known as gender-confirmation surgery) is no different from a tummy tuck
The greatest difficulty people have with cross-dressers, I think, is that
cross-dressers wear their fetish, and the gleam in their eyes, however muted
by time or habit, the unmistakable presence of a lust being satisfied or a
desire being fulfilled in that moment, in your presence, even by your
presence, is unnerving. The combination of the cross-dressers' own arousal and
anxiety and our responsive anxiety and discomfort is more than most of us can
bear. We may not mind foot fetishists, but we may not wish to watch them
either. The
cross-dressers of Tri-Ess insist that cross-dressing is not about sexuality,
and therefore not about sex. They are right about the first, and we can all
stop assuming that any man who wears a dress is gay. But they are not right
about the second, and their assertion, their defense, that cross-dressing is
their creative expression of both genders is unsetting, because it is at such
odds with their behavior, their natures, and their marriages. These men are as
far from being gender warriors and feminists as George W. himself. As one wife
said to me, "For twenty years he couldn't help with the dishes because he
was watching football. Now he can't help because he's doing his nails. Is that
different?" For these men, the woman within is entirely the Maybelline
version, not the Mother Teresa version, not the Liv Ullman version, and not
even the Tracey Ullman version. There is no innate grasp of female friendship,
of the female insistence on relatedness, of the female tradition of support
and accommodation for one's partner and giving precedence to the relationship
overall. If there were that kind of understanding, rather than shopping for
accessories and watching tapes on how to walk in heels, these guys would be
unable to ask their wives to go through this cross-dressing life with
them—and everyone, husbands and wives, knows it. They know that if any of
the women insisted on wearing three piece suits or baseball uniforms in
public, and asked their husbands to accept hairy legs, hairy underarms, and
jockstraps as part of their sex life, the husbands would not be rushing off to
join spousal support groups while cheerfully spending the family's money on
bespoke shirts and expensive glue-on facial hair. The marriages would be over.
As
with the Ladies' Home Journal of the 1980s, or Cosmopolitan of the seventies,
eighties, and nineties, when I read Tri-Ess's advice to wives, I don't know
whether to laugh or cry. The advice seems to be both traditional and
optimistic, and when optimism seems impossible, the general tone is that love
conquers fear and a good man is hard to find. If Dickens's Nancy were alive
today (and Bill Sikes, his sadism aside, is exactly the kind of macho,
overcompensating, risk-taking guy one might find crossdressing, she would be
in a wives' support group, happy to pick out a lipstick, apologizing if they
ran out of Slim Fast a week before the Harvest Ball. Is
it just delicious irony that makes so many people's eyes sparkle when I tell
them about my Christian Republican cross-dressers? Is it something less
sophisticated, like schaden-freude, or even less civilized, like homophobia? It is
gratifying to yank the covers off hypocrites: the fundamentalist Christian
congressman with his handsome young pages, the old-school feminist who
tolerates abusive boyfriends, the priest and his porn. The
widespread assumption is that heterosexual crossdressers are hypocrites,
publicly lambasting deviance of all kinds and dressing up in private like
Little Bo Peep. There is still plenty of Little Bo Peep (and Scarlett O'Hara
and Courtney Love) in private, but the lambasting has died down considerably
since l980. In the past cross-dressers were eager to disassociate themselves
from gay men and about as interested in feminism as Ward Cleaver. Now the
unimaginable has happened, and the landscape has changed. All the
cross-dressers I spoke to expressed admiration for the gay civil-rights
movement and hope that whatever acceptance gay people have won will somehow
envelop cross-dressers too. Gay men and women turn out to be their role models
in terms of self-respect, even if the cross-dressers are well aware that the
gay community offers them tolerance but not a warm welcome. And feminism of
the women-are-nicer-people variety, although not a part of the wives’ lives,
adds an unexpected aspect to the cross-dressers' self-image: in their remarks
about the burdens of masculinity and the innate nurturing and graciousness of
women, and in their attempts to connect with nature and spirit, they sound
like the softest and most Goddess-worshiping of second-wave feminists. Almost
everything Tri-Ess has said about its members is true: they are straight and
traditional men who love their wives and wear dresses. Just as Tri-Ess says,
its Christian, conservative Republican men have a great deal more in common
with other Christian, conservative Republican men than with anyone else. Their
wives are not professional women with their own substantial incomes and career
paths; and they are not royalty or Hollywood types who expose their spouses'
peculiarities and let the muck cling to their kids. They try to make their
marriages 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. The wives are not uniformly overweight, motherly, and devoid of
self-esteem (as some mediocre research has suggested they are), or at least no
more so than any other group of middle-class women married young to
traditional and dominant men, devoted to home and family, and lacking in
advanced education. Juggling the limited resources of time, money, and
pleasure, balancing dominance and fear, self-deception and love, selfishness
and desperation, crossdressers and their wives struggle with one big
difference— his compulsion—and otherwise, just as they have told me all
along, they are just like everyone else. ~ |