Transvestism

[pancakestastelikecrepe]

Hands up - who thinks if all those women championing males had had an encounter with a good, old fashioned transvestite, they would feel differently?

When I first got involved in this no-debate debate I got friendly with a couple of TVs who insisted they were allies, acknowledged they were men, and seemed genuinely respectful of women's spaces and rights. In one case it took about 6 months before the cross-dressing was permanent and they were wheedling their way in to all-women social groups and requiring a great deal of attention. The other one took longer and - I think - had more difficulty squaring their actions with their ethics. But the result was the same. It opened my eyes.

OP, 10 minutes spent reading threads on old school transvestite/ crossdressing forums would be eye opening.

Many years ago I worked in acute mental health services. I met many men with severe and enduring mental health conditions and personality disorders. A high % had various paraphillias including cross dressing. Many had disturbing ideas about women
This was before the massive growth in trans ideology. I have never felt comfortable with males who believe themselves to be women. I am not confident their idea of womanhood is that wholesome

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.

Presumably there are women who would do the same, but that doesn’t threaten my rights and safety in the same way.

I genuinely think all these well-meaning people who argue that these men are suffering and we shouldn’t turn them away, even if it means “letting a few bad apples in” have no idea what message they are sending out to all the men who are on that line. If they really think it’s not an open invitation to any dodgy man out there, then they are obviously very ignorant of human nature and (in my experience) men in particular.

Transvestism is a really common paraphilia, and very common in sex offenders. Its like since the onset of the current madness most people have forgotten something that everyone used to know - some men find pretending to be women sexually exciting.

Many years ago I worked in acute mental health services. I met many men with severe and enduring mental health conditions and personality disorders. A high % had various paraphillias including cross dressing. Many had disturbing ideas about women
This was before the massive growth in trans ideology.

We know this. It is a thing. We're expected to never allude to it or mention it as a reason for why we don't want males in female spaces.

@TheCurrywurstPrion

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.

My God if you haven’t just perfectly articulated the creeping realisation of my thirties.

@DrDinosaur

Transvestism is a really common paraphilia, and very common in sex offenders. Its like since the onset of the current madness most people have forgotten something that everyone used to know - some men find pretending to be women sexually exciting.

Yes but we're not supposed to talk about this or acknowledge it, to do so makes us big meanies. Also, the fact that some of these men delight in making women uncomfortable with their presence, and that is part of the thrill is also not to be seen or acknowledged or talked about.

Because their need to get off is more important than our need to feel safe.

The good old-fashioned ones simply became "trans".

I would like to be there at the end of this debate when the TRA teenagers realise that transsexual people already had equal rights, and that they weren't fighting for the extension of rights to gay and transsexual people, but rather they were fighting for the rights of heterosexual men.

[quote Sandinmyhooves]@TheCurrywurstPrion

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.

My God if you haven’t just perfectly articulated the creeping realisation of my thirties.[/quote]
Quoting this yet again, as it encapsulates the situation perfectly, as far as I am concerned.

I wondered if TV is actually a thing or is just the lower end of Apples Grapes and Pears: that it was always that, but curtailed by not being socially acceptable.
TV was (just) socially acceptable, but the floodgates have been opened now with the onslaught of trans ideology and here we are, with transitioning men in droves, and the apparent disappearance of TVs and cross dressers.
Olderbager1's comments about the journeys from TV to trans of several men are noteworthy

@Giggorata I feel like porn is a last bastion indicative of this same thing. Nice guys in RL - totally respect women. Same guys watching violent rape on the daily. Fine. It’s totally okay. Everyone does it.

Also, the fact that some of these men delight in making women uncomfortable with their presence, and that is part of the thrill is also not to be seen or acknowledged or talked about.

This. People are so naive about this. Or they don't care about women. Or both.

@DrDinosaur

Transvestism is a really common paraphilia, and very common in sex offenders. Its like since the onset of the current madness most people have forgotten something that everyone used to know - some men find pretending to be women sexually exciting.

I do question the sex offenders intentions.

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.

'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

@DrDinosaur Exactly - and now we appear to be on the cusp of legislating for a male sexual fetish

@Roseglen84 I concur

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.

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?

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...

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.

@ResilienceWanker As @Roseglen84 says, it's not the dress, it's the sexual gratification of sartorially presenting in said dress. In addition, the transvestite I had in mind when I originally posted was very much in favour of the 'pornified' look he thought best represented 'woman'.

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.

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.