Fetishes are the flaw in pure gender critical thinking (mine included) which says that men wearing women's clothes shouldn't matter at all and that clothes shouldn't be coded m/f. It doesn't take account of what is going on around someone's choice to present unconventionally from a gender point of view.
These Chains That Have No Name: Interview with Trans Widows Voices
by By Donovan Cleckley -March 31 for Women Are Human.
(extract)
DC In the past, I have pointed readers toward the stories of trans widows, both those seen at Trans Widows’ Voices and elsewhere, such as Christine Benvenuto’s 2012 book Sex Changes. But one characteristic I have noticed, though, even strikingly exhibited among women, is denialism. And it tends to manifest in multiple layers. First and foremost, one denies that any man would do what these men do in the private sphere to women around them. It resembles the denialism toward domestic violence more generally. One might assume that a man would only identify as a woman from love, as a man would only marry a woman for love.
TWV We are all, men and women alike, guilty at one time or another of denying the evidence before our own eyes, because it does not fit in with what we have previously believed – or because it enables us to reinforce an aspect of our beliefs or personality that is important to us. For example, I have just spent a disturbing weekend watching the recent Woody Allen documentary and asking myself why I ignored for so long what was in plain sight. But it was because it concerned a man whose work I admired.
I encountered an interesting example of denialism recently among gender-critical feminists in the UK. There was a story in the newspapers here about a man who worked in a supermarket and how he had obtained the agreement of his employers to wear a skirt – that is, the female uniform, rather than the trousers customary for male employees. He said that he doesn’t think that he is a woman; he just finds women’s clothes more comfortable.
Gender-critical feminists believe that gender nonconformity is perfectly acceptable, and that, if more people were accepted when they showed nonconformity with sex-role stereotypes, there would be no need for people to feel that they have to transition. These feminists believe that the problem is not in what you wear; it is in the idea that what you wear can change your sex.
Unfortunately, in this instance, the desire of many feminists to show that they are accepting of gender-nonconforming behavior entirely overrode their usual ability to think critically. They took the man’s claims entirely at face value, and, for a couple of days, gender-critical social media was full of women saying “Good on him!,” “We need more of this!,” etc.
What they failed to notice was that the man in question, if you applied a modicum of critical thought to the article, was very plainly autogynephilic and had been given a license to exercise his fetish at work. Aside from wearing a skirt, if you actually looked at the images of him, he was wearing women’s shoes, stockings/tights, and a padded bra. Further, he described a typical pattern of escalating boundary-breaching behavior – and that he had high heels, makeup, and wigs at home. Also, he described, in his own words, ‘borrowing’ clothes from girlfriends. He was duping everybody around him about his motivation.
Some of the women supportively sharing the article became very defensive when challenged, even when challenged by women who had their own experience of living with this kind of behavior and who they would usually support. The only bright side of the whole sorry incident, is that it convinced me that those women who look down on us for not leaving sooner, and who say they would have left at the first sign of that sort of behaviour, are actually just as gullible as we were, if not more so.
We all want others to think that we are not bigots, but it behooves us all to think about when our performance of not being bigoted toward crossdressing men becomes actively bigoted against women." (continues)
www.womenarehuman.com/these-chains-that-have-no-name-interview-with-trans-widows-voices/