Transvestism

It is common knowledge here. Would you use the phrase 'the disabled brigade' or 'the minority ethnic brigade'? I suspect not.

Ok sorry I just thought it was common knowledge so was coming from that place.

I'm a lesbian. I attended Pride from the 80s but haven't beenfor a decade because of what was happening to the LGB community. I'm one of the early members of the LGB Alliance.

If part of your point was that the LGB community hadn't been consulted before being forcibly teamed with the TQ+ then you didn't make it very well.

Part of my point is that LGB people aren't consulted on what constitutes LGBTQI+++.

It's become a joke and it's why I support LGB Alliance, not Stonewall.

Crossdressers and fetishists are officially included in "the brigade" it's a hard fact to stomach but it's true. Try going to a pride march one day.

Your phrase 'the LGBTQ+ brigade', is offensive and dismissive. And it's really insensitive of you to ignore or be ignorant of the fact that many of the women who've stood up to gender ideologues and suffered for it are lesbians: Julie Bindel, Linda Bellos, Kathleen Stock, Allison Bailey, Keira Bell are names that spring instantly to mind.

Apparently an old joke in transvestite/TW circles (think I may have heard it mentioned in connection with the Beaumont Society?) went something like "What's the difference between a cross-dresser and a transwoman? About five years...". So it seemed to be well recognised that there was often a progression from one to the other. I suspect it goes a lot faster these days though, or that many of those who would have followed that path now just go straight to identifying as "trans", as that often doesn't seem to mean anything but changing clothes and possibly growing your hair long now, anyway...

FFS I got deleted for pointing out that cross dressing and transvestism are fetishes that have been absorbed into the LGBTQI++ brigade. Openly. Stonewall have laid it out clearly "trans includes cross dressers". Which includes men with a paraphilia.

For crying out loud we can't mention this? Stonewall mention it bit women can't!

People in general set a lot of their internal norms based on what is socially acceptable. Many (most) people have times or things where they would like to do stuff that are widely considered Not On. Maybe not super serious things, but stuff like not bothering cleaning out trash bins, or eating the food other people leave in the work fridge. And also more serious things, like not peeping on people in the toilet.

There is a range where people will try and get away with these things but secretively, or in some cases may do them but feel guilty knowing it's wrong, but they do actually work for a lot of people. Both at an individual level and maintaining social norms that help keep things on an even keel.

I suspect there will always be a capacity for people, especially men, to develop odd fetish interests. I remember reading about the rubber guy and how he was first aroused by rubber seeing a wet suit as a kid. Well - that is not anyone's fault and not much could be done to prevent it. But in a society where that was seen as not healthy, a person might make an effort to avoid letting negative sexual interests become obsessions. Many boys who might be interested in dressing as women might just not actually do it so it doesn't become a reinforced behaviour. We'd also be limiting exposure generally to certain types of material.

Obviously this will not prevent everything like this, but those boundaries do make a difference. But right now our society does not actually seem to recognize the value in things like boundaries, habits, etc, in sexual things but also in self-regulation more generally. The assumption is we are born a certain way and these capacities "develop" and it's wrong/ineffectual to try and limit that.

Sadly, I concluded years ago that a lot of men who behave adequately when the lines are clear and well accepted societally, delight in stepping over boundaries as soon as it’s apparent they can do so without negative consequences.

There is quite a bit of research into this problem, with a sizeable minority of male subjects freely admitting that they would rape a woman if they knew they would get away with it.

This is why social boundaries and not just legal ones are so vital to the safety of women and girls - if there is not even a social penalty for transgressing women's boundaries, we are in serious trouble. And that's not speculation. All we need to do is look to countries around the world where the victim of a rape is punished for having extramarital sex whereas the rapist often faces no repercussions at all. The social boundary there is all tied up in virtue - women's virtue. And if she loses it, it doesn't matter how or that it wasn't her fault or happened without her consent. All that matters is that she is no longer a virtuous woman and deserves to be punished for it.

I'm sure that breaking the rules once they are no longer properly enforced is not the preserve of males. There's probably a good explanation for why that happens and why that's an advantageous trait in evolutionary biology. What matters is that it does happen and we absolutely do know that it does.

So it flies in the face of everything we know to claim that people will not transgress boundaries if there's no repercussions for them doing it.

Do you remember the Terence Stamp character in Priscilla Queen of the Desert? He dressed like a stylish middle-aged woman off-stage, all wide trousers and drapy cardigans. Nothing tarty or overtly sexual about him!

The transwoman I know slightly used to call himself a transvestite. He is in his 30s and wears girls' school uniform (mini-skirts). He indoctrinates his primary school age daughters about the unfairness of schoolboys not being allowed to wear skirts, and they are now obsessed with the various trans flags. They are planning their emigration to Canada.

Sorry, cross posted mangyinseam - yes, that all makes a lot of sense. And I think "boys liking dresses" is definitely a different social coding to them wearing eyeliner or nail varnish or being interested in fashion... more trying to "look like" the other sex rather than just liking the colours or styling. And it's possibly crossing that boundary that becomes the issue. Thanks for your thoughts.. it's very interesting!

Thanks roseglen and pancakes - I can totally understand that it has been used as a "gateway" into full on transgenderism, and there has been a huge amount of boundary demolition. I'd agree with izzard's initial statement though - who cares?! As long as that stays the case and isn't used to prove anything in terms of "living as a woman" at a later date . And yes, I can see there's very much a difference between a man wearing a tunic and leggings or something, because they are comfy and he likes the pattern albeit he'd get bollocked on style and beauty for his sartorial choice and someone out in full makeup and heels definitely "acting" as a kind of woman for a different reason.

Going over it in my head again, I suppose there is something to be said for everyone trying to maintain a certain level of social "comfort" in terms of dress, behaviour or anything. So things that make one section of society uncomfortable - especially more vulnerable members - is a social no-no. So men "masquerading" as women - even if done with no bad intentions is frowned on, if the people being aped don't like it (doesn't explain the popularity of drag/ dames in panto or similar - but I suppose that is in a safe space in terms of being an act in a theatre). Similarly, if I decided to dress as a man when swimming, wearing the smallest of speedos, I would expect to get hustled out of the pool pdq, in terms of public decency... In other non-dress behaviours, I'd expect a "good" man walking behind me at night to cross over the road or something - to acknowledge that I would be aware of him, and uncomfortable, and try to alleviate my discomfort. A man not doing that wouldn't be doing anything wrong, but I would be much, much more wary of him. A man wearing a dress isn't doing anything wrong either, but would/ should expect women to be much more wary around him (despite it "just being clothes") so most men would not want to cause that wariness for the sake of something a bit more in keeping with their style...so just be a bit more conventional.

Interestingly (IMO!) there is no provision for transvestites in the equality act, other than under the "gender reassignment" category. So a man who wore a dress at work could (I think) only claim for discrimination under that - even if he had no intention of reassigning his gender. Which does kind of push them in a particular way, I suppose.

ResilienceWanker

I've thought about that a lot, and the conclusion I've come to is that while specific items of clothing are not inherently coded male or female, the fact that we do code things male or female is much more deep seated.

So when you have a young boy who happens to like rainbow coloured rain gear or whatever, it's probably just that it is something that appeals to little kids. His sense of things being coded male or female isn't well established anyway, and that kind of colour is appealing to lots of kids.

But then there as kids get older there is the possibility of actually wanting to dress like a woman. Whatever that involves where you happen to live. And why do people do that? Well it might be in some cases about playing with fashion, or gender norms, getting attention, things that we often see in the arts. It could also be about fetish or sexual taboo breaking.

Sometimes people here talk about gender non-conforming kids in a way that I think is rather confusing, and it parallels this distinction. Because it could just mean a boy who likes fashion, or maybe sounds what people used to call as a effeminate but is just normal for some male people, has long hair (though that has been common for men for decades) etc. But in some cases people seem to use the term to describing boys (and these are boys, not men) who are really focused on, for example, wearing dresses, or other things that seem, not random preferences but something else.

But are there really people who, in order to be their authentic selves, need to wear a dress? I actually don't think so. Tribes of people living in the Amazon jungle weren't suffering a crises of authenticity because they really needed to wear dresses. It's just a bit of clothing.

We can of course have a society with pretty similar clothes for men and women. Lots of places have because there were not resources for people to dress differently. We have a lot of leeway in our society. But people still tend to have some things that reflect sexual dimorphism culturally. I suspect that is not really the underlying factor in a desire to somehow emulate or appear as a member of the other sex.

ResilienceWanker I agree with you, and I used to have no issue with men wearing women's clothing, until they started to assert that it somehow made them into women. I would argue that it wasn't women who changed the parameters, but the men who keep pushing the boundaries.

A bit like Eddie Izzard, who used to just say 'they're not women's clothing, they're just clothes, who cares'...but now somehow it mean's he's a woman .

Also, if you look up AGP (not sure if this will get deleted because we are not allowed to talk about it on this site ), you will see that for some men, the wearing of women's clothing is a sexual fetish, and it has disturbing undertones of fetishising our subordination.

So yes, it now makes me more uncomfortable because I have seen behind the 'it's harmless' smokescreen to something more sinister.

Sorry to gatecrash your thread op, but this is something I've been wondering for a while. I don't post in this section much, but I've been reading it and learning loads about the threats to women's rights and so on.

But this transvestitism/ cross dressing or whatever confuses me. As I understand, GC people (and I would consider myself one!) object to the notion of "stereotypes" being used to define people. Wearing a dress doesn't define me as a woman any more than waring jeans makes me a man. Similarly, I tell DS he can play with whatever he likes, wear whatever he likes, have his hair as long as he likes (and it is loooonnnng) and he's still a boy. He's on board with that - but he's only 10 so not totally subject to social assumptions/ norms in the same way adults are. His mates don't pick on him for wearing rainbow wellies, having crazy hair, doing gymnastics/ dance or anything that could be construed as "feminine", and I wouldn't expect them to.

But at what stage does "there aren't boys or girls clothes" become "men wearing dresses are sexual predators/ pretending to be women/ displaying a sexual fetish"? Isn't it an "ideal" to have men who like dresses accept that they are nevertheless men, and for other men to accept that within the realms of maleness? I totally appreciate that we are far from that now, and it may well be that at present many "innocent transvestites" are anything but - but in theory, a dress is just a dress, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a man wearing one, without wanting to "pretend he is a woman".

I suppose I'm just interested in where the line is drawn, and why the social stereotype around female/ male clothing is so strongly guarded (especially in terms of men... not so much women dressing in stereotypically male clothes)? And at what age are boys/ young men supposed to start "dressing in a more acceptable male way" (whatever that means) to avoid being seen as predators, or at best, a bit creepy, by women? I've heard arguments about it being a protective thing (as above, a female silhouette makes identifying a criminal more tricky) or about men seemingly "debasing" themselves by "dressing as women" so it's just offensive. But ultimately, why do we have these assumptions, when we want to move away from clothing being a signifier of sex?

Sorry if I've said anything to offend, and I appreciate many may have first hand experience that makes me seem naive - but the visceral reaction to "men in dresses" being a bad thing and a definite indicator of something sexual/ deceptive just seems hard for me to square with what we tell our children - that what you wear/ do/ like doesn't define what sex you are and you can express yourself however you like, within that sex...

Yes, that breaking taboo thing is why I'm always a bit puzzled about the woke admonishments against 'kink shaming'. Isn't the whole point of a kink that it's supposed to be shameful?

Another reason they may do it, is not due to the sexual arousal of wearing the clothing of the opposite sex, but transgressing taboos. Their behaviour is already taboo (and rightly illegal), but it's whether it's the act of taboo breaking that is arousing, rather than the actual cross-dressing.

This is a problem about the way society thinks about sex now in general.

Lots of people find transgression of some kind a turn-on, whether at a very minor level or not. My guess sis it has something to do with the brain chemistry around danger and how it interacts with sexual arousal.

But we now think that it's just great for individuals to go after whatever they want in terms of sexual excitment, including "being naughty".

What should be obvious to anyone with a brain is that if you say the naughty things are ok, they cease to be naughty, and you have a constant need to escalate. Which is not going to be healthy for individuals and not for society as a whole either.

'Trans people may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms, including (but not limited to) transgender, transsexual, gender-queer (GQ), gender-fluid, non-binary, gender-variant, crossdresser, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman,trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois.'

www.stonewall.org.uk/help-advice/faqs-and-glossary/list-lgbtq-terms

On the one hand disguising themselves as women makes the crime easier to commit (as it's harder to distinguish a potential perpetrator from CCTV and from a distance), prisoners use it to gain access to female only spaces.

Another reason they may do it, is not due to the sexual arousal of wearing the clothing of the opposite sex, but transgressing taboos. Their behaviour is already taboo (and rightly illegal), but it's whether it's the act of taboo breaking that is arousing, rather than the actual cross-dressing.

Unfortunately any studies into it will be blocked by the trans lobby, so it's just down to people guessing on message boards.