Being a teenager/crossdresser

[Penni SO]

Hi ya all,

I am the Spouse Rep for the Chameleons, link www.chameleonswa.com , and just recently I was contacted by a not quite 18 year old. He asked for my advice on a couple of crossdressing questions. One I was out of depth with and the other I could re-assure him that he was a perfectly healthy young man who should not deprive himself of a positive happy life, just because he enjoyed to dress in womens clothing.

The members of the Chameleons answered the tucking situation, as really I am out of my depth there. They also stepped forth to talk about their experiences as a young man.

It was then that I realised that not enough is written for the teens, I told this young man that inner acceptance and well being was his first step to having positive self esteem about himself.

You see, he felt he was a freak because when he dressed he became extremely aroused, had an erection and then orgasmed. He then felt the need to get the clothing off as he felt disgusted in himself.

I told him we all have ways of expressing and meeting our own sexual desires. His problem was that he wanted to dress for longer periods but with the shame of his sexual arousal he thought this never possible.

With the shame he felt that he should never enter a relationship with a woman because he would fail as a man ... this young man is also a virgin.
My heart plummeted to think he would deprive himself the chance of being with a lovely young woman. It saddened me that he felt he was a freak of nature.

He wrote to me mainly becuase I am a mother to children and also the wife of a Trasnssexual, he felt that for him there was not enough written and availble to help him with his issues ... and do you know what, I would have to agree with him, for young men entering puberty and wanting to crossdress there just isn't enough material.

Sex is a very big part of our chemistry, it can affect how we function on a normal daily basis. If we have suppression, if we have to pretend, if we feel we are not functioning like everyone else, we can quickly become isolated from everyone. I speak as a GG, but for you lovely people, many of you know the loneliness and the isolation.

Most of you have been through many expereinces in your life and now I call upon you to open up your past to this young man. I have given your link to your site, mainly because here the people do tell their stories from their past, especially when the past is constantly rearing its head into your future, especially when has affected your relationships with the opposite sex.

Hope you can help.

Hugs Penny

[Jennifer M]

I can remember very clearly what it was like being a teenager and feeling the need to dress. Unfortunately they are memories of fear, isolation and confusion. There was no where for me to turn and no one to turn to. My parents would not have understood, they still dont.

Today, thanks to the internet and the few good sites like this one, no one needs to feel what I did. The best advice is to read the posts, even the older ones. Be true to yourself, and know what I didnt until just recently . . . you are not alone, and we are all worthwhile.

[Jill S]

His feelings sound sooo familiar! It was pretty much the same cycle of dressing, masturbation and guilt for me. I don't know when I first dressed without the sexual part, most likely in my 20's. I'm now almost 50 and dressing is not very sexual, but the urge to dress is stronger than ever. The guilt and shame are the things to work on. Crossdressing may be with you your whole life, please don't drag tons of guilt with it. I wish I had talked with someone, anyone, about it long ago. Who to tell is always the tricky part. You are not alone, many of us have been teenage Xdressers. Just pretend that every 10th guy you meet during the day has women's panties on under his drab and you may be right!

[Anita]

Hi Penni--
I'll have more to say on this one later on. It is a BIG issue, and even on the Internet, it isn't clear enough. Younger people who might come here on the forum will not get a clear picture of what it was like for us as teens--all they can see if who we are now, and that is a separate issue from how we dealt with it then.

Of course there's the "My Beginnings" stories, but many of them gloss over the teen experiences--it's as adults that we got into dealing with spouses, children, family, and the general public if we ever go out. We take our teenage alienation for granted--for anyone over say, 25, there wasn't much in the way of support out there.

(I did post again. Scroll down.)

[MariaA]

Hi Penni,

I am definitely not a teenager but my experiences and feelings are right along the same lines as the person you are talking about. I guess it is because I am new at playing out my CD desires (about 3 years) in front of another person or are we different. Although I have been doing it along for years in hiding it has always been and still is a sexual thing. It all ends up in a sexual orgasm. I have always felt and still feel different because the sexual connection has never left.

Around the tucking, I have discovered that you can tuck up or down. I found tucking down extremely unpleasant and painful specially if you have an erection all the time while dressed, like in my case. I discovered a way to tuck up. By using two “control top” panty hoses, you can hide the erection pretty much.

I would like to hear from some of the more experince girls about this situation related to sex and cross dressing. Are we different?

Love,
Maria

[Stephanie W]

Hi Penni

Glad you could be of some help to get this young man pointed in the right direction. The best advice I can offer is to continue to encourage him to read through the many stories here and he'll gradually come to see he is not alone and that there are many people here willing to answer his questions and provide whatever support he needs. I think just being comfortable around likeminded folks will make all the difference in the world to him and that burden of shame he is feeling can be overcome. You can tell him when that time comes, (and it will) he'll be much more comfortable with himself and start to enjoy his crossdressing more. Of course, I'm sure you already knew that part.

Stephanie

[Anita]

That feeling of disgust after orgasm is tough to deal with. The thing that teen CDs might not realize is that that feeling can be brought on by many different sexual experiences, especially when a person is younger. So to stop dressing is not a cure-all for this, unfortunately.

Being a teen CDer is still a lonely experience, even with the Internet. If you can't drive yet and you don't live in a big city, you have no way at all to go to a support group. I can't say enough for support groups. It's great to have online support, but there's also a need for face-to-face contact.

My teen friends and I talked frankly of some sexual matters, but believe me, even now I don't think CDing is a subject any boy will ever bring up. So it's not like you can figure out which of your friends might also be a CD. Even if they put out tiny 'hints,' I'd still think it would be a hard question to ask directly.

I never felt the need to tell any girlfriends, since all we were doing was 'fooling around.' I don't know what I would have done if we were really intimate, but that is much more probable now. Unlike adult dating, though, it's not like your high school girlfriends are necessarily going to be long-term partners. With adults, I'm all for honesty before it gets to that stage (of intimacy). Is it as important as a teen? It looks like only the teen himself can know--is he only into casual encounters, or does he approach each girlfriend like she's a long-term partner? Tricky question, that one.

Last of all--I crossdressed as a teen, and then didn't do it much at all for 32 years. Very unusual, and highly unlikely that it will be that way for 95% of CDers. So I'd have to say that you, teenage boy, have to expect that you're going to be dealing with this in some way for the rest of your life. If you're one of the 5%, well, great, but you can't count on it. And if a boy can stand to read these stories, he can see that it can lead to some success.

There will probably have to be some pain in getting there, since most of us did go through a real struggle. But there is hope out there; to repeat what's being said again and again now, you're not alone any more.

[Penni SO]

Hi ya Anita and Silverlady,

The young man in question has a femme name, and it is Caitlin.

Caitlin is a little reluctant at the moment to speak or join anything at the moment; however, I have told him to go with his inner self. When he is ready he maybe able to get to our group...but at the moment it is a maybe.

Reading other stories, for him, is showing him that he is not alone. For so long he was thinking he was a freak of nature or that maybe he was supposed to be gay, like a drag queen, was his words to me.

Thank you, Anita for talking about girlfriends, another big issue for Caitlin. Girls like him and he like girls, but again he thought, nope, freak of nature, better not go there.

What he did say was that if he ever did get intimate with a girl he would more than likely get excited sexually over her underpants rather than her....

My advice to him was to take things really slowly when it comes to girls. Too many kids think that having sex at a young age, like around 13 upwards, is something they should do to gain merit from their peers. Many complications arise, such as teenage AIDS, teenage pregnancy, etc., I told him that what he does on his own at the moment is not harming anyone, and when the time comes, when he is ready, he may find a young lady that just may share his life with him, with confidence at that time he hopefully in the future will be able to tell her about his dressing before they become intimate.

I have told Caitlin life is a journey and so, too, is the dressing, to take her time and to learn about what makes Caitlin, what makes her tick.

In time he will learn more about his dressing and I have assured him in time he will have control over the sexual experiences he has with his dressing. The main issue I wanted him to understand is that no shame or guilt should be inflicted on him from himself or anyone else. That he can still be a productive, community minded man, he does not need to hide behind the shadows of life, he needs to live life.


Hugs, Penny

[SilverLady(SO)]

Hi, Penny -

Thank you for the update on Caitlin . . . I do hope that she takes the time to read what can be found at both of our Forums, for there is a wealth of information for her. The advice that our own members have provided here for Caitlin is proof that the fellowship of sisters, the sorority (as Virginia calls it), comes together to help one another. The advice you gave her is good . . . but then, too, you have a natural talent (besides being a great mom), and it shows!

When Caitlin is ready to join, she will be more than welcome here. As I have mentioned to you in PM, Caitlin may contact me direct at any time she chooses and I can put her in contact with those in her same age group. I am sure that some of them are experiencing the same thoughts and feelings as she is, and it's important for them to know that they are not alone, and there is no shame in being a CD.

Hugs!

- SL

[Absaroka]

Penni I've thought about this post a number of times and put off replying because I didn't know how to answer it.

I'm left with the feeling that for a teenage crossdresser the operative word is teenage. I remember that time as one of almost terminal confusion. And while crossdressing is certainly something with a lot of baggage all the other stuff is even more confusing. What teenager isn't confused about sex?

What helped me was Ann Landers. I would read about CDing in her column every now and then and it reassured me that I wasn't gay, which was a big deal back then in the 60s. Also was the unspoken message that if Ann Landers was writing about it then it must not be that unusual. THe other big help was reading Playboy. All those letters advocating acceptance of among other things homosexuality made me understand that sex and sexual variation was not something so awful.

I didn't tell anyone. I knew better than to do that-kids get mad and spill secrets. If you can't handle having everybody know, then don't tell anyone......or at least be very careful. In my early 20's I met the first love of my life. She had been through a drug rehab and had heard just about everything imaginable. I told her; it was small potatoes to her. But only after I had known her for a year and she had told me her whole sexual history.

If I had to say one thing that was most important, I would say that learning that crossdressing is what I do, not who I am, was important. For me it's a game, sometimes sexual, sometimes not. It doesn't change anything important about me. There were so many other things I didn't like about myself that I learned to accept as well. Like being shy, being a nerd, being unathletic, most of all being scared of so many things. CDing paled in comparison to those things. At least that could be kept a secret.

One thing that wasn't clear is how much of this boys CDing is sexual vs. gender identity. From your description it sounds like it is sexual. For me it was important to understand that I am a bit different from many people here. For me CDing is a heterosexual male thing. It's my identity as a heterosexual male that makes it exciting, both sexually and non sexually. So although I enjoy all the discussion of our inner woman, to me it is really a discussion of my non traditional male side. Of course this may not be the case, maybe he is struggling with some sort of gender ambiguity. I don't have any advice on that.

I wish I could figure out how to help someone find that "aha" moment when they realize they are as good as everyone else. Not better, not worse. For me it had a lot to do with anger, "saying F---all those people who told me I was less than" There's probably a better way.

Reading all our stuff here, going to the library and reading about it, that may all be helpful. There was a popular book called "All you ever wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask" which I found helpful-it also reassured me that I was pretty normal.

Sorry I don't have more to add.

Absaroka

[Anita]

I'm left with the feeling that for a teenage crossdresser the operative word is teenage. I remember that time as one of almost terminal confusion. And while crossdressing is certainly something with a lot of baggage all the other stuff is even more confusing. What teenager isn't confused about sex?

This is an important point, Absaroka. I didn't always like the fact that I crossdressed, but I was also aware that it wasn't necessarily that much stranger than a lot of the other stuff that was going on around sexuality. There are a lot of secrets the boys keep at that time. I wish it weren't so, but it is. This is when boys either discover or suspect that they're gay, or transgender, or that they have this fetish or that one. So I knew that my particular 'secret' was just one of many that my friends and I had. And my crossdressing made a certain amount of sense to me. It was not about wanting to be a girl, at that time, and I could see that it also didn't have anything to do with being gay. It was about creating a girl that would be there for me, since there wasn't anyone else around.

I was fortunate enough to have one friend who I could talk to about the confusion that we were going through. Not the crossdressing, but the extreme and relentless 'drive' that both of us experienced, that never let up. It is not all fun to be a teenager, with no socially sanctioned ways to deal with sexual attraction. It is still like that even now. It is especially bad at 12 or 13, because even dating was not really an option in the little town where I lived. There was no place to walk to on a date, and many of the girls lived on the other side of the school district, 15 miles away.

The idea that I was creating a fantasy 'girl' for myself was not a solution that I necessarily liked, but none of the ways of dealing with the situation worked very well, that I could see. It got a little better when I was 16 and could drive, and therefore date. Meanwhile, there's almost 4 years of going crazy behind sexual hormones, and not knowing any good way to deal with it.

[Penni SO]

Hi ya ladies,

Teenagehood we all at sometime wish we were back there,but when you go down memory lane we all I think realise just how traumatic it was.
For many kids today the sad reality is the breakdown of the family home,not having that someone who you can trust to tell what is going on within yourself.

With the intro of the internet many teens are turning to the sites for help and unfortunately many are being abused by adults who gain their confidence and lead them into a spiders web of lies and abuse.
No site is without its predators and for that reason I thankyou for talking openly about your own real life experiences.
Many teens today do get caught up in a fantasy world,to protect them from the hardships they face,it must be equally as hard for a young man who discovers that 1 he is a crossdresser or 2. he was born in the wrong physical apprearance.
Adults today,parents today are equally dealing with the hurt and shame from the past,they are just trying to survive this hard world and because of this they don't have time to listen...I know they would like to listen.
I know this is why Caitlin contacted me,and hopefully in time she will be able to join this group and ours and hopefully she will have hope restored and her confidence restored in knowing that many before have passed through this journey as a teen and that many teens can find help from those that have been there before them.

Hugs Penny

[Merinda]

Hi ya ladies,


I know this is why Caitlin contacted me,and hopefully in time she will be able to join this group and ours and hopefully she will have hope restored and her confidence restored in knowing that many before have passed through this journey as a teen and that many teens can find help from those that have been there before them.

Hugs Penny

HI Penni ,

Caitlin would benifit for the simple reason of "not feeling alone" , this was the first forum that I joined in '04 after my first public outing.
At that time I ventured into a whole new phase of my transgenderism and it became a serious issue with my SO and I needed help , just reading through the posts I found similarities with other members and these lovely ladies gave me the best advice.

Penni,
On the Chameleons forum you have provided a professional approach and we all benifit from your advice and love the topics you put up , as I said once before you are very strong and you have my total respect.

[CJ]

Hi all,

Very interesting thread, Penni, and some great posts and replies, too. I just thought I'd add a few thoughts to what people here have expressed so well.

If I had a tip to give Caitlin, it would be this: get information.

Like Absaroka, as a teenager I tried to explore--in a most circumspect fashion--whatever sources of info I could find out there that dealt with crossdressing. Back in the late 60's and early 70's, there weren't that many. Like Absaroka, I was familiar with the occasional Ann Landers column and with the Penthouse and Playboy magazines (and, later, with Penthouse Forum) so I knew that CD'ing existed, that I wasn't alone. Eventually, I looked up books on sexuality in my high school library. Then, at the age of fourteen or so, I found the infamous Mutrix publications in a magazine shop that sold adult material; at this point I began to see that crossdressing sexual fantasies were more commonplace than I'd thought. So, I wasn't alone there, either. It was a watershed moment for me.

Caitlin has access to the internet so her search for info should be easier than mine was. Yes, there's much crap out there and porn and idiocy, but there's much gold, as well. This very site, along with the Chameleon's and a few others, are proof.

Good luck to Caitlin!

Love,
CJ

[Penni SO]

Hi ya Ladies,

Firstly Merinda thankyou for your lovely words,re;the chameleons.

Thankyou everyone for helping this young man through his journey in life.We have all experienced the growing pains of finding what and who we are,but I do know that for many those pains continue into adulthood.

Caitlin has read here and at the Chameleons forum and is very greatful for your information and guideance.However Caitlin I guess is where many have been yesterday as well as today,self acceptance in believing in oneself.
I guess Caitlin feels that they will need to hide in the Shadows of the night as well as the quiet of house once all has left for their daily movements for sometime to come.But as I have assured Caitlin in time as she grows older and has only to answer to herself,then just maybe then she will let go of the shadows and see herself in a different light.

Right now for Caitlin and many youngsters to follow we need to be seen as the lighthouse of hope,showing them that many have been through this journey have made safely it through their part of life.

Hopefully young people like Caitlin will realise that it does'nt matter if your bisexual,gay,lesbian trans,it is your heart and soul that makes you a person,a friend, a lover.It is not how you dress or who you make love to in the quiet and privacy of your home,it is your virtues your morals,your motivation your self esteem that people should see.
That crossdressers,Transsexuals,Gay,lesbian are people of a community a large community that help this world function,that people like them count......and Caitlin that is very important my dear,you really do count,no-one shold tell you otherwise.
Caitlin you will come through this part of your journey and I know from it will come great strength,you just have to believe in yourself.

Hugs Penny