Stressed out PhD hopeful in dire need of feedback and critic

[Anita]

Anthony wrote:

I suppose there is one basic, rather self-serving, thing I am getting at when I talk about a tentative narrative. That is I don't recognise myself in the narratives that are out there in the public domain. And I'm not sure that these narratives aren't talking about some other sort of person - or maybe the sort of person who doesn't exist in reality. Like then they'd be a projection of cultural norms/stereotypes onto CDs.

I've been dealing with this all of my life, and have not seen it described quite so well. If I was around other people, and described who I thought I was or why I was acting a certain way, it often did not seem to have meaning for them. So they constructed a version of me that they could relate to, and acted on that instead. It's like the old saying, "When my only tool was a hammer, every problem looked like a nail." Or only looking for your lost keys under the street light, because you can see better there.

The transgender community is one of the few places where I found understanding. I think that's why my girlself has had such a powerful effect on me. Other trans people understand where I'm coming from better than I've ever been understood in any other context, and that includes music.

That is, unless they follow point E) above - that is relate to their partner emotionally. Then they might intuit their way to some sort of reasonable relationship with their partner. On the other hand they might go totally the other way and go "Yeuch, I don't want any of this".

If you think that the price of understanding is that you'll go there and be trapped in it yourself, then you won't want to risk it. When I was younger, I had a part of myself that was angry enough to kill without any remorse--I won't sugar-coat it. [Edit: I never actually killed anyone behind this feeling. However, it was clear to me that that's what it was. Other people reacted with fear when that part came up, so I knew that they felt it, too.]That is not something that friends and romantic partners wanted to understand, and I can't say that I blame them. In some ways, I think that my becoming a woman was a compromise solution--it was extreme, but not so extreme that there was no one who would acknowledge it.

To try to tie this back into Lelitia's original questions: what could be some of the factors that make it so hard for a spouse to "go there" emotionally? The stereotype is that women are better than men at putting themselves into someone else's situation, and understanding how they feel. That doesn't seem to be the case with CDing, though, at least, not when the woman is partnered with a CD.

Anything that has to do with successful reproduction would seem to be hard-wired into our DNA. Gender recognition is very much part of that--that is, always being able to clearly recognize who is a potential mate, and who isn't. Trans people can be seen as going against this basic "law," and that could be part of why our presenting as women brings out such strong reactions in people. This is not new information, but it's been a while since I read it anywhere.

Even agnostics and atheists are affected by what our DNA programming tells us is 'true,' so a person doesn't have to be religious to feel that laws of nature are being violated somehow. Intellectually, people may not believe this, but they might still feel it anyway.

[Anthony Simon]

Anthony wrote:

That is, unless they follow point E) above - that is relate to their partner emotionally. Then they might intuit their way to some sort of reasonable relationship with their partner. On the other hand they might go totally the other way and go "Yeuch, I don't want any of this".

If you think that the price of understanding is that you'll go there and be trapped in it yourself, then you won't want to risk it. When I was younger, I had a part of myself that was angry enough to kill without any remorse--I won't sugar-coat it. That is not something that friends and romantic partners wanted to understand, and I can't say that I blame them. In some ways, I think that my becoming a woman was a compromise solution--it was extreme, but not so extreme that there was no one who would acknowledge it.

Well, how much of the anger was product and how much of it was cause? Like if, as above, there was this part of you that society wouldn't see - like people made up their version of you instead - then you're going to have a blocked up frustated part. Hence intense anger - you say (implicitly) some of that intensity went away when you made yourself into a woman. But that fits with what you said above about finding understanding in the TG community. For then you wouldn't have been so blocked up, hence less intense anger.

...And thanks for the complement!

[Anita]

Anita wrote:

When I was younger, I had a part of myself that was angry enough to kill without any remorse--I won't sugar-coat it.

I amended the original post to make it clear that I never ended up actually killing anyone behind this feeling.

[Letitia_Jolie_GG]

Hey everyone Thanks for the very very insightful replies.

@ Paulette and Anita- you got me thinking a lot about my personal involvement with crossdressing, where it came from and how I am going to go about being sincere about it in my research. Sorry if you had trouble finding my initial post- it may be because I used to post in 2009-2010 as Letitia_Jolie_SO and changed my username when I came back, in order to reflect my current status.

I guess there's a personal dimension- having dated a crossdresser, having been there for him, staying friends after our breakup- and also realising that, after leaving the relationship, I still have a kink for men in lace panties (which I did not have- or was not aware of having- before the relationship). And then, there is the political dimension of my interest in studying crossdressers, which comes from my standpoint as a gender-egalitarian, sex-positive feminist. Because of my political beliefs, I see crossdressers not being widely accepted and even being seen as more of a "thing" to be talked about more than "men who like to dress in blue" as an example of how the patriarchy hurts men and how our gender regime hinders self-expression- so yeah, I guess that tends to define and influence how I approach it a lot.

@Anthony- now I see what you're getting at much more clearly and I think it's absolutely brilliant In my particular corner of the academic community, what you're talking about could be referred as "constructing the Other in discourse"; and it is something that my paper will absolutely need to address. So basically there is medical/psychiatric discourse which constructs crossdressing as a pathological conditions that needs to be corrected (I've read horrifying cases happening a few decades ago in which crossdressers were subjected to basically either to what amounted to basically torture or to some really dodgy drugs, in order to get them to stop) ; there is religious discourse that says crossdressing is a sin- and all of these have their reverberation in mainstream culture- where they are amplified and replicated by cultural anxieties about gender and "alternative lifestyles". What society (with the examples of, say, a tabloid newspaper, a medical journal, a wives' peer support group) can say about crossdressers meaningfully epends on the narratives that you were talking about- the images in our head that structure our perception of the world.

Now, where there is discourse there is always also counter-discourse; but that does not mean counter-discourse is always unproblematic. I mean, thinking back on my relationship with my ex... I remember, I was in my first year of uni, studying sociology and philosophy; and by then I had already quite a strong liberal feminist consciousness. Very soon after he told me he crossdresses, I went to the university library, I read Judith Butler and I came to the conclusion that crossdressing is wonderfully subversive and it's- like- the most feminist act ever, so we're totally going to celebrate it. (Exaggerating bit for artistic effect, but you get the point...). His reaction: "Well, I'm not trying to subvert anything, I just like wearing lace panties and corsets". I did make sense of his crossdressing through a certain kind of narrative,a kind of (counter)discourse that suited my identity- and while it was not by any means as toxic as the "crossdressers are freaks", "crossdressers are mentally ill" or "crossdressers are sinful" kind of narrative, and I still think it actually helped our relationship a lot- it wasn't exactly accurate.

So I'm guessing, if I understand you correctly, that I started off this project thinking that the key to resisting toxic/objectifying/problematic discursive constructions is to deconstruct them intelectually- that is to reveal and understand where they come from, what power structures they're based on and how they hurt us all. Your answer, on the other hand, is to more or less brush them aside and relate to each other emotionally instead- which the more I think about the more it makes sense- so that is something I absolutely do need to explore; what I'm thinking, though, is to what extent the kind of discourse that we are exposed to is what influences our feelings and emotions as well as our conceptualisations? This is why I want to see if wives' feelings are coherent with their conceptualisation/mental image of their husbands' crossdressing- where they are, then it may be the case they feel this way because they have internalise a certain kind of discourse; where they aren't, it may be because while they do not resist//reject mainstream discourse intellectually, they counter it and cope with it on an emotional level. (Of course, at this stage, before actual research, this is only speculative).

[Anthony Simon]

@Anthony- now I see what you're getting at much more clearly and I think it's absolutely brilliant

Thank you, Letitia. The cheque is in the mail - and it's a big one.

So I'm guessing, if I understand you correctly, that I started off this project thinking that the key to resisting toxic/objectifying/problematic discursive constructions is to deconstruct them intelectually- that is to reveal and understand where they come from, what power structures they're based on and how they hurt us all. Your answer, on the other hand, is to more or less brush them aside and relate to each other emotionally instead- which the more I think about the more it makes sense- so that is something I absolutely do need to explore; what I'm thinking, though, is to what extent the kind of discourse that we are exposed to is what influences our feelings and emotions as well as our conceptualisations? This is why I want to see if wives' feelings are coherent with their conceptualisation/mental image of their husbands' crossdressing- where they are, then it may be the case they feel this way because they have internalise a certain kind of discourse; where they aren't, it may be because while they do not resist//reject mainstream discourse intellectually, they counter it and cope with it on an emotional level. (Of course, at this stage, before actual research, this is only speculative).

My feeling is you can only get so far with deconstruction. Like, if the narratives about CDs are basically constructions of us as a kind of fantasy being, deconstruction of those narratives won't reveal what CDing is actually about.

My sense is that's going to leave your audience up in the air. Like you'll have shredded the previous narratives about CDs and left nothing in their place. I suppose this is my problem with deconstruction in general, but I do feel for the audience in that sort of situation.

The emotional responses of SOs strike me as, to a degree, honest responses. They can be really horrible - or they can be admirable - and they will be mediated by the narratives out there. But they're also often about an attempt to reach a situation where the couple can go on living together. It's hard to know just what precisely goes on there, but I think there's a strong likelihood that the SO comes to some sort of (maybe unconscious) grasp of what their partner's CDing is about and how it impacts on them. And they find they can live with that - because I do think long-term relationships are based on a canny understanding about just what the other partner is about.

In that case, buried inside the emotional response of the SO, you have some hints (Or better) at what a non-fantasy narrative about CDs might be. The question is just how you might be able to get to it - like present in such a form that it's acceptable to people reading your thesis. It probably would just be talk - but you would need an alternative to the Platonic discourse.

[Paulette]

This has been stretched out for so long I wonder where it's gotten?

There are so many things to consider. There are at least several different kinds of CDs, and multiple development and experience and patterns within each. Just in this board I've seen maybe 20-30, or more (wasn't counting).

If you were to go through the entire archive of posts here, categorizing each for age, experience, goals, changing goals, coping, type of partner relationship and satisfaction, out-ness, gender attraction, gender identification, etc. (one could go on, and on, and . . .) and then sorted them for various relationships, you might end up with several discernible trends. Maybe. Then you'd have to see if some hypotheses can be gotten from the correlations and juxtapositions. And THEN you might test the simplest and most common ones. In other words, clear away the debris and then see what's in front of you. See what Masters and Johnson did, and how their model changed as they learned more.

Then consider that there's no way to actually get into someone else's mind, or even your own, with any degree of confidence. So you'll have to work with behavior. Which means you'll have to have a working hypothesis of what that behavior really means rather than depend on circular or operational definitions (IQ is what IQ tests measure; hyperactivity is X behavior exhibited Y times in Z minutes of observation at Q times per day in R settings with S per cent agreement among T observers on Mondays), isolate the variables, hold all but one or two constant, and try not to contaminate your results or observations. Good luck.

I much prefer an intuitive anecdotal approach, with all its faults, because I trust my intuition most of the time and I can sometimes write pretty clearly. Piaget's observations of his own children is my ideal. The problem there is that like Piaget, you have to be willing to look at your subjects with the same objectivity that he used for many years of studying fresh water microfauna. That probably rules out anecdotes from boyfriends or partners, past or present. Good luck.

So, where are you now in your quest for a thesis?

[Letitia_Jolie_GG]

Yeah, the more I think about how I'd want my research to be, the more I realise I want a very "intuitive approach"; I've mostly redone my project, and if you're willing to, I'd love you to take a look at it- you have a wonderful critical mind . (Got an email address you would be willing to give me by PM? If not, just let me know if you're interested and I'll find another way to send it to you). One thing I know for sure is that research is going to be qualitative rather than quantitative, based on in-depth interviews (and therefore more "comprehensible" than "generalisable"), and "conversational" rather than "observational". (I got this idea from Kate Bornstein's "Gender Outlaw").


I definitely like the idea of a model that's flexible enough to change as I go along

[Ralitsa]

So my understanding is that your goal is to establish the pathways between the feelings and beliefs of SOs and how that affects their conceptualiztion of crossdressing and consequently influences their behavior. And that seems to be less related to crossdressing actually, as it is to how one's conception of their surroundings and their world view is influenced by their history. In that regard, I see that Anthony's point about fantasy beings as really the key issue.
So partners that have a preexisting dislike for anything abnormal, can be expected to form a conceptualization of the CDer that would be unfavorable, no matter how inaccurate. Which perhaps explains why my ex, when she wanted to prove that CDing was evil, tried to convince everyone I was a drug dealer and wanted to murder her (not exagerating). My explanation was that she is simply wacko.

Well mapping that relationship should be a pretty straightforward task, once you've collected all the data. And actually I think it will be quite easy to enlist the cooperation of the unsupportive SOs, as they may see this as their chance to explain their side of it and to justify themselves. As it is not the crossdressers themselves that you are looking at, deconstructing the counter-narrative is really the task.
That will be a very fascinating study. I've often wondered about the consistency between behavior, beliefs, and the rationalizations which people use to disconnect their behavior from their beliefs. I expect the most interesting part will be for those who must find a way to reconcile their feeling that it is wrong with their feeling that they have a duty to be "a good, faithful wife".