To be sad that someone can’t be themselves?

[ImpeckableChicken]

Didn’t know which topic to put this in so I do apologise!

A close relative recently confided in me that he likes to dress up in ladies clothes. He is pensioner age, married 40+ years, 1 adult daughter and grandchild.

His wife found out years ago and told him to pack it in and threatened to tell their daughter.

He still does it in secret, and has said if he were younger he would consider transitioning.

He has terrible mental health issues and it’s made me wonder if it’s because he’s never been able to be himself?

I’m a problem solver and a part of me wants to say to him ‘Fk them all! Be yourself!!’

BUT

It would be chaos. He fears his family would disown him, wife would leave and god knows how his daughter will feel.

It’s hard to watch and not do anything. Anyone been in a similar position?

But he is being "allowed" to indulge his fetish in the privacy of his own home. Why does he need to involve the rest of the world in it? I love walking around naked in my house. I would not think it fair or appropriate to force other people to have to take an active part in my nakedness.

Why does he need validation? What is the point for him? And he does not want to "dress as a woman" OP. He wants to dress up like a doll. He wants to put on pretty dresses and lipstick and stockings and heels. That is fetishing womanhood.

And stop trying to make his wife out to be the bad person by going on about how he drives her everywhere and comparing her Hyacinth. That is so misogynistic. The dynamic of their relationship is none of your business. He has had a loving wife who has cared for him, his home, and his child for decades, and stuck by him when he tried to actively involve her in his fetish that he hid from her until they were married.

But yeah, the poor ikkle man doesn't get to involve the rest of the world in his delusions...

Generally it's a good idea not to make drastic decisions when suffering poor mental health. Does he exercise? Volunteer to help others? Cook? Have wholesome hobbies that can be discussed with his family?

If you want to improve his life I'd suggest he concentrates on those aspects of his life.

I wish I was treated like a man

• no sexist comments , no ogling of my body , no treating my thoughts as second class

• I can feel that there is no actual difference between me and men - so I must feel like a man then

I mean no real difference that should make men and women act differently towards me than they do men ( not everyone of course ) ( you know the sort of thing - the assumption that the woman takes the minutes , that she's only interested in the colour of the car ..)

To that extent I do feel like a man - I feel my thoughts , my brain, is as good as any mans, not different and not less capable , and so deserves as much respect ( many men and women are brighter than me - my thoughts are not as good as theirs )

So I can feel like a man as in many senses and the ways that I don't are driven by sexism

I am often male when I dream ( I have vivid dreams ) - again I suggest that shows in some sense I feel like a man

I also have dreams where I am two people side by side - one male one female - usually acting out stereotype roles of fear and bravery

Oh look what makes the difference is stereotypes and societal education

Bullets unintentional and no edit on app

Spot on midge.

This 'why can't they live their true authentic self' is what progressive sexism looks like. It is nothing more. Nor nothing less.

When I was 18 / 19 I spent a period hating the fact I was a woman and wishing I was a man. I didn't like the lack of respect, the way I was dismissed as stupid or a silly groupie at gigs and I thought guitars looked 'wrong' on women.

I wasn't sold snake oil thankfully.

I would like to add that "being themselves" or "being oneself" is a bit of a misleading phrase.

We all are exactly "ourselves" in that we are the person in the life that we are leading, instead of a different self, ie the life we could have, had we made different choices.

So in this case he is living as himself, ie a man who likes cross dressing but has chosen to keep it secret, for whatever reason, and perhaps has regrets now.
His true self isn't a man who has always enjoyed cross dressing and has been open about it from when he discovered it, and therefore was honest to any future partner and the people around him.
He may wish to have been the second hypothetical man, but he isn't, he's the first.

It's a bit like me saying, my true self or "soul" is a hippy mother of three earth who lives off the land and lives freely, when the reality is that she is not me. She is an imaginary character who I may look up to, but who has very different qualities to "actual me". Real me might hire a camper and travel round for a few weeks in the summer and grow my own tomatoes in the summer. I can't be anyone other than who I am.

He has a festish called autogynophilia and yes, I wouldn't stay married to a man who wanted to force his fetish on friends and family.

Tbh if I found out my dh had this fetish, even if he never "came out", I'd still divorce him.

AGPs are misogynists.

Should we similarly advocate for and indulge people with anorexia? Agree that yes! They are fat! And should be losing more weight. Dysphoria is a mental illness, however it manifests. Why have we decided that one manifestation should be championed and not another?

I guess the relevance to the op is

It's normal feeling like you are the same as the other sex but it can't ever be the same because there are experiences formed by sex that you can never have

The dressing up and clothes is irrelevant to being female - my feelings don't change based on clothes , people don't change their behaviour if I wear trousers. The fact that he may want to wear bra is at odds with many women not wanting to ( so to truely feel like a women you would have to not want to wear a bra if that makes sense)

Yes it's sad mens clothes are quite boring / simple but many men have broken out of that mold whilst wearing clothes better suited to a male body - that's expressing their full true and authentic self - acknowledging their body as well as their mind

wearing women's clothes won't change him and it won't make others treat him better

If you want to help him you need to understand why he thinks it would help to be seen as a woman - what's wrong with his life that he thinks that would go away if he was a woman , or it's it just that he knows life needs to change but doesn't know how ( mid life depression stuff ) - but be prepared for sexual issues to be involved - that could include a drifting apart in the marriage , it could include "performance" problems

the generational thing is misleading. My mum is 83. She was a hippy in the 60s, and got into heavy rock in the 70s along with me and my younger sibling. They may still have had problems continuing work after marriage & children but they weren't 50s housewives either.

As for married 40 years - i have been married nearly that long (married young) and i was one of the original "sitting outside Virgin records necking cider" punks and then a goth.

These are the generations we're talking about here. If they've been married 40 years they will have been in their early years of marriage when the New Romantics were borrowing their girlfriend's eyeliner.

Has this man ever gone and paid for therapy?

His poor wife and kid, having to suffer the secrecy. Him creeping around in his wife's underwear. Looking at himself in the mirror and getting sexual thrills.

"Himself" is a fetishist, posing as a poor hard done by victim.

"Live as a woman".

Right. Men who want to "live as a woman" only pick and choose the bits the like to perform, based on their male view of what women are.

Sexy
Wanting attention and catcalling
Heavy makeup and nails
Submissive, usually sexually
Like soft things
Tinkly laugh
Head tilt
Validation from the "sisterhood"
Be dominated by a man
Be with a lesbian woman
Smashing the glass ceiling "first "woman" to be in the Queen's guard/beefeater"!!
Kept and pampered

It is NEVER

Wiping arses
Doing unpaid, unacknowledged labour in the home
Wage disparity
Medical misogyny
Fear of rape
Unwanted pregnancy
Etc

The only way to live as a woman is to be born a female human being.

Just for clarity a 'trans man' is a woman pretending to be a man. A man pretending to be a woman is a 'trans woman'.

The language around transgenderism is deliberately confusing. Many people misunderstand the terminology.

This makes surveys of the general public's views unreliable and screws up things like the recent census.

It also obscures to the truth. 'Transgender woman convicted of possessing thousands of images of child sexual abuse' reads differently to 'Man convicted of...'

This. OP: does your friend want to do more of the domestic labour in the house? Does he want to do more of the cooking, the cleaning, did he want to spend more time taking care of his child while she was growing up?

I'm betting not. I'm betting while he was hiding in his bedroom putting on stockings his wife was running the house and cleaning up after him.

That's not the sort of woman these men want to be. They only want to be the sort of woman they see in films and porn.

"Just for clarity a 'trans man' is a woman pretending to be a man. A man pretending to be a woman is a 'trans woman'.

The language around transgenderism is deliberately confusing. Many people misunderstand the terminology."

Then you can't really say "for clarity", can you? Those terms aren't clear to most people, and there are no commonly understood terms. As you say, the intention of trans rights activists was to mislead.

For real clarity, I'd use "trans-identifying man" and "trans-identifying women": humans can't change sex.

I agree and use those terms myself.

I was trying to make the previous posts clearer to readers by pointing out the meanings of terms commonly used by others.

You rarely see trans-women in frumpy or modest clothing I don't agree with this, these are the people who end up on our TV screens or on social media, but there are moderately well known middle-aged transwomen wearing middle-aged women's clothes, Deborah Czeresko from Blown Away (the glass blowing show) springs to mind, also the gender theorist professor Raewyn Connell. I don't think it helps to stereotype anyone or insist they ought to wear a certain type of clothes. I've seen two men in skirts recently around my city and we are not particularly 'out there', this is uninteresting to me, skirts are pieces of cloth, it's the rest of the taking over to which I object.

I think it's a case of "be yourself, but if others find some aspects of your personality disturbing, you'll just have to deal with it like the grownup you are". Surely that's a risk we all run when disclosing private things, it's not unique to men with AGP?

You are absolutely right and I have just proved your point by accidently writing "trans-man" when I meant "trans-woman" despite being aware of the correct terminology. Perhaps my reluctance to refer to these men as women even prefixed with "trans" led to my mistake.

I suggest "man-pretending-to-be-a-woman" would be the most accurate, but it's a bit clumsy and I suspect TRAs would be outraged by such honesty...

I wonder this too.

Then you can't really say "for clarity", can you? Those terms aren't clear to most people, and there are no commonly understood terms. As you say, the intention of trans rights activists was to mislead.

Agree, they don't play by the rules of language and common understanding so why should anyone else.

He is 70+, old fashioned generation. Men went to work, women stayed home, cooked and cleaned.

Get off with this 'old fashioned generation.' If he's 70/75 he grew up in the 60s, would have been in his 30s in the 1980s when women went out to work as a matter of course. Both his parents probably worked and his wife as well.

He might have been too scared to do anything when other Trans people were coming out. But it is his choice about whether he is now brave enough and divorces, or carries on as he is.
I do not really know what you want from this thread OP.

No one 'feels like a woman inside'. What the fuck does that even begin to mean?

Indeed. Also not clear what part of being a man would prevent him from "doing his hair nice" or "feeling beautiful inside"?! 😂