Rambling on "WHY"

[Paulette]

A great many reasons 'why', and no one of them is sufficient to explain the why of me, even to myself.

I've explored several thoughts on this, in several places here, in my FB Notes and in MHB, and most recently in Laura's Playground. None of them are adequate or complete, though each of them describes my thoughts of the moment. I suspect that will always be the case, so I'll continue writing as I need to, to express the feelings of the moment, in hopes of further understanding, and so that others may take from it what is meaningful to them.

What has been constant? The need, in varying strengths, to dress and give myself up to my young female self, wholly, sexually, narcissisticly and then fall into deep sleep or mindless meditation, until I 'wake' as my older but no wiser self again. Before this marriage it was always alone, privately and in secret from family and spouses, with some urges toward exhibition to strangers which were usually but not always suppressed. Now, it's almost always with my wonderfully accepting wife while we make love. Occasionally I dress to work or lounge around the house (she's an unemployed designer and I have the remains of a small publishing business I've run out of my home since 1974) so there's really nothing to stop me from dressing every day. Yet I don't.

Born in 1940, I was raised by my mother and her sisters and girlfriends. I watched and then helped them dress and put on makeup, and prepare to go out to dance and drink and smoke and be sexual beings with each other and with strangers. My father was in the service, stationed in India, and while he was there she divorced him. She married again, but to a man I never much identified with or felt close to.

My first urges to dress occurred at about age eleven, in the family bathroom where the dirty-clothes hamper was kept. My mother wore Sears hardware bras and panties and was weaning my baby sister from suckling her, so her bra smelled of milk. It was to me, 'her' smell; and the feel of a Sears bullet-bra with a breast in it, was to press my face against her bosom. I couldn't actually do this, press myself against her that way - two brothers and a sister were between me and her. It was probably my first sense of loss and remembrance of joys past and now unreachable. So I rubbed myself against her clothing, and eventually put it on myself, and pretended.

Then the usual discovery, punishment (electroshock series - standard practice in the 1950s), suppression, military service, rediscovery, exploration of alternative sexual practices and lifestyles, marriages, and after 73 years, still, still, uncertainty.

Imprinting, association, identification, emulation, conditioning, cross dresser.

Still a cross dresser. Probably always will be.

Fishing out the "why" at this point is impossible. But there is acceptance, learned slowly and bit by bit, up to my present mostly-out and happy self. Would I have transitioned had I not had electroshock? Quite possibly, but I'll never know.

[April Rose]

I would suppose it's because the real world hasn't offered me a more attractive alternative. I'm certainly not getting it from my job. I enjoy being active with my leisure time; golf,bicycling,skiing,etc. but there is nothing there I can build an identity on. Imperfect or not, feminine dress and a homemaker's lifestyle are where I've found a measure of fulfillment.