A Man in a dress- how would you feel?

In our sexist society, wearing gendered clothing is charged with power dynamics. We can try and pretend that its a neutral act, but its not.

Its possible to subvert or try to question this dynamic of course, but it seems so often to involve a sexual element when men do it that I am a bit wary about men who ostentatiously wear women coded clothing. Caution born of experience.

What point are you making? It's not strange to be attracted to your own body, even if it's been changed. It isn't a 'bad' thing to be attractive to yourself while fantasising about yourself as something other then reality.

The harm comes when it becomes such an obsession that you remove your own healthy body parts and/or believe that those changes or feelings entitled you be treated as something you aren't. The harm comes in telling children that it's the answer to their problems. The harm comes in the fantasy somehow overriding other people's reality.

I'll also note that most of the operations you mention are considered 'cosmetic' and aren't provided by the NHS. I wouldn't do any of those unless it was repairing or restoring something personally.

You also didn't address my later points. Even if AGP in woman is a thing. How does that effect anyone but those individuals?

The paraphilia is doing the same but crucially about body parts or attributes you DO NOT possess.

Um, women get boobs & bums 'they did not originally possess' & it increases their libido.

Many studies show that procedures like breast augmentation, abdominoplasty and labiaplasty frequently correlate with higher sexual satisfaction, greater arousal, and improved intimacy.

That study is rather impenetrable without signing up to various things, I struggled to find the actual questions that were asked of participants but the whole concept of the study is bizarre.

Is it surprising that someone thinking about sexual attributes that they in fact possess (eg their own genitals) could be arousing? Of course not.

The paraphilia is doing the same but crucially about body parts or attributes you DO NOT possess. Like being aroused by the idea of having missing limbs when you are able bodied.

It's kind of a moot point to the discussion anyway. Is women being sexually attractive to some idea of their physical selves somehow harmful or maladaptive? Are they seeking surgery to fix something? Are they saying children should be taking drugs to feel the same way? Are they demanding access to a space that they shouldn't be in because they feel sexually attracted to themselves??

Whatever criticism people have of Moser's or Blanchard's work it points to something that is self evident tho….for women. You don't need Moser only to be a woman to know we 'enjoy' our own bodies. Of course some women don't but to allege that all women don't says more about the individual making this claim than anything else…& its called sexual repression.

Moser came to his study with the opinion that Blanchard was wrong. Moser then created his own scale (taking bits from Blanchard) to ‘measure’ AGP in women and ‘proved’ it existed. Moser’s work has been widely criticised. I assume you have an academic login and can look at the critiques of Moser (and later Serrano) and aren’t just relying on abstracts.

We know AGP is a thing

Indeed, for men AND women.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19591032/

Like mushrooms after rain, any post that acknowledges the complex relationship women have with the framework of expectations we are delievered into without a choice the day we are born triggers the wail "oh but women have agency! They just choose clothes that align with objectification, marginalisation and at the far end, sex work, domestic enslavement, FGM, to express their own innate authentic selves!"

Misogynist faux-feminism of the basest, naivest, stupidest kind.

Comparing men wearing 'womans' clothing to women wearing 'mens' is disingenuous. These acts are not symmetrical. Women have far fewer fetishes then men, are far less dangerous then men, are far less sexually driven then men.

Even a number of well known transwomen are open about the fact that their 'transness' started as a fetish. Eg Hayden who even went as far as full blown genital surgery to fulfill the fetish.

We know AGP is a thing, and just like our comments about not letting men into female toilets because we can't tell which ones are the 'nice' ones. We often can't tell the difference between the ones who are getting off on dressing 'feminine' Vs the ones who are innocently pushing social boundaries for positive reasons.

Saying this, I don't have an issue with men wearing whatever they want as long as it's situation appropriate exactly as I would feel if a women did the same. With men however there is the added consideration that it could be someone displaying sexually paraphilic behaviour.

There is a reason that women have an instinctual caution of such men. Fetishes and paraphilias tend to cluster. If they have one there are more likely to be others. Exhibitionism, vouyersim (like pretending to be a woman to enter a woman's changing room to watch women undress) and yes paedophilia are highly correlated among others.

This isn't me saying that transwomen are perverts, it's me saying that some of them will be and prison stats would suggest they are indeed more likely to be pervert then other men because of the clustering nature of paraphilias and the fact that they are happy to undermine the comfort of women only supports this.

Womens caution is not women's fault. Just like it isn't our fault if we are afraid to find ourselves alone on a dark street with a man. These fears are caused by human instincts, socialisation and collective experience.

We shouldn't be expected to 'get over it' when we bare the brunt of the consequences if we are wrong. Our fear isn't bigoted.

Men are very welcome to prove us wrong by not acting like predators...

Translation: Women have no individual agency & are programmable robots.

If you knew anything about feminist history you would know that the feminist pushback would have never existed without individual agency. According to you "entrenched male power & norms" prevents that.

Who needs the patriarchy when GC feminists will do their dirty work for them.

I dont care as long as he uses the Male loos and doesnt think he has magically turned into a woman just because he is in a frock. Give no fucks. Not terribly uncommon in the 90s or indeed the 70s. Bowie looked fabulous!

I'm sorry, are you suggesting Patriarchy wasn't - in fact in some places still is - an organised system of rape, enslavement, torture and murder?

Have you seen the trafficked women in German mega-brothels? The socially embedded levels of MVAWG in every country in the world including ours? The domestic labour expected and exploited from women?

And before you get all eye-rolly, what this has to do with "trans women wearing lippy" is that "trans women wearing lippy" is part of the same structural system that defines female people purely from the male perspective and in so doing reduces female people and female lives into resources to meet the needs of male people.

“These days, after years of misogyny from the trans industry, I would feel very different. I would suspect all cross-dressing men of being potential voyeurs or exhibitionists who would trespass in women’s spaces.”

Exactly this.
I would (now) see it as the thin end of the wedge, leading to unwilling involvement in someone's paraphilia.

On another thread, @TransParentlyAnnoyed, you voice your vehement support for a known racist. Yet when it suits you, racism is abhorrent.

As a Black woman I find this absolutely appalling. Please stop invoking people of colour and our struggles to suit your agenda when you are happy to condone and support racist people. And racist misogynists at that.

Oh right, racist (blackface upheld an organised system of rape, enslavement, torture and murder - trans women wearing lippy isn't the same thing) as well as enjoying making misogynistic, transphobic comments about appearance. Yeah, exactly the kind of comment I'll reply to in detail.

Ugh.

It's not bizarre at all, it's just that you ignore the nuance. And as part of that, you are deliberately (?) mis-understanding the historical power imbalance between men and women even today, and the dark-side of the "sexual revolution", where womens empowerment to make sexual choices has been bastardised and sold back to us in a form that continues to sexualise us and objectify us while telling us we are the winners here, at the population level, without actually emancipating us to be truly free from the male gaze, and entrenched male power and norms. Hence porn that "empowers" women while it actually degrades us, and "sex work is work", which is actually majority desperate women with no other real options for survival, or even "just" believing that your real value lies in appearing attractive to men, and thus dedicating hours and days and weeks and years to attaining beauty standards that you have been conditioned to believe are your own. This is not where feminism wanted to lead us. But here we are.
Selling us empowerment through cheerleading for all of this is male domination with a potential dose of capitalism and is what the radical feminists fought against.

Just had a very pleasant ten minutes looking at photos of Nicky Wire thanks to this thread. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday morning.

You lost me at lesbian guys.

A man wearing a dress who knows he's a man and doesn't 'identify' as something else? Cool beans.

I'm a child of the 1980s and the most beautiful men all had something a bit stereotypically 'feminine' going on. Into the 90s men like Nicky Wire looked fabulous in a dress. I met DH in the early 90s and he often wore dresses on nights out. We were goths and it was pretty common for men to do so.

TIMs reckon they're busting gender stereotypes by wearing women's clothes when in fact they're reinforcing them - spinny skirt and lippie is what maketh the woman apparently. Men chucking on a dress and not claiming to be anything other than men is far more of a challenge to sartorial gender norms imo. Like Annie Lennox's androgyny in the 80s was for women.

People should wear whatever they want. You don't need a penis to be able to operate a trouser suit and you don't need a vagina to rock a dress. As long as you know that wearing either doesn't magically transform you into the opposite sex, it's all good.

I think designers are missing out on a whole new market. They could design tops, dresses and skirts for male bodies. If a man wants to wear a dress, and it’s appropriate for the occasion , not a lycra minidress for work etc, he should have at it.

Slippery slope. He’ll be borrowing your brightest make up and telling you that pegging is routinely practiced in households up and down the country next.

I think the reason men usually look ridiculous in dresses particularly is they are completely unsuited to the male body, much like we have male and female tops, jeans etc. Doesn't matter if they are trying to look like women (never successfully of course) or just making a male style choice. Skirts are probably more forgiving and I have seen some men pull off the look eg. a modest knee length skirt loose enough to not show male contours.

As long as men are dressed modestly and still in male facilities it doesn't really matter what they wear though if it was a man in my own family I would worry what others think of them.

There is a lot to unpack here.

1. Men don't wear dresses 'all the time, especially LGB guys' (no L, because lesbians aren't guys). By 'all the time' I suppose you must mean, sometimes at nightclubs.

2. Most of us in the UK don't regard Scotsmen in kilts, Saudis in white robes or David Beckham in a sarong as being 'female'. Western men also routinely wear loose bathrobes, with no loss of 'maleness'.

3. Arguably, the most homophobic and misogynistic people are men. So it's bizarre to claim that men wear dresses and skirts to challenge 'homophobic, misogynistic myths about clothing'.

4. Totally agree that men who claim to identify as women can and do wear what they want, including silicone prosthetic breast plates to look like a pornified drag queen or 'doll'. It's insulting to women in the same way as black-face is insulting to black people.

So if men wear female coded clothing but remain men, then surely TW *who are men) wearing female coded clothing also remain men….

I think this sums it up!