Men dressing as women; what really motivates them.

[Teribus21]

Malcolm Clark does not hold back on what really motivates men dressing as women.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/04/02/kristi-noems-husband-and-the-dark-secret-of-trans/

No one has an issue with men wearing dresses etc because they like the shape or the patterns or the airflow.

The issue is with men wearing women's clothes because they are specifically women's clothes. Because of what that represents to them.

Surely you see the difference?

Other than trans men, women started wearing previously male-coded clothes because they were practical or because they liked the look. And they said "There's no reason these have to be men's clothes, they can be anyone's. They can be women's." And women's clothes shops started selling them and manufacturers starting cutting them to fit women. The clothes that had been exclusively seen as men's clothes stopped being exclusively men's clothes once women started wearing them.

Whereas with cross dressers, their motivation is wearing women's clothes. Dressing "as" women. In their mind the clothes do not become men's clothes. And if society started accepting currently female-coded clothes as male or unisex, the cross dressers would stop wearing them.

To put it simply, it's the difference between men having dresses altered to fit male bodies and starting to demand men's clothes shops start selling dresses cut for male bodies, and men buying dresses from women's clothes shops then wearing corsets and fake boobs to fill the dresses like women do.

(I do find "flip the sexes in a situation and now feminists are hypocrits" like it's some sort of clever gotcha so tedious. It's like the entire social context in which sexism happens doesn't exist. It's like giving one child a million pounds on Sunday and the other a fiver on Monday, then saying the first child is being treated ubfairly because they didn't get a fiver as well 🙄)

Those have all been standard women's workwear and leisure clothing for more than a century.

Grayson Perry says that he wears a voluminous skirt to hide his erection when presenting as 'Clare'

Grayson Perry who turned up at a children's cancer charity fundraising event with a dildo poking through his dress/coat.

For anyone doubting this, I shit you not.

Yes, gross..... but the original point was that cross dressing as a 'kink' need not be a superficial matter. For Perry it began as a way to escape the anxiety caused by having a violent step-father. Perry imagined that if he was a little girl his step father might treat him more kindly. The roots of the kink have deep emotional resonances and provided a means of reconciling conflicted feelings and longings....but they also, and inevitably, take on a sexualised aspect. And as he got older the cross dressing became an overt performance - one that had become an habitual practice, and one to which his sexual orientation had permanently shaped itself.

How does “feeling different” equate to”I am really a woman not a man”?

Isn’t there something going on at the moment about Ethel Cain popping ‘her penis’ out on Instagram. No idea who they are but I guess a TW.

These are normal women’s clothes, unless you are posting from 1926.

Who is often a childlike persona.

Even in 1926 they had stopped being exclusively male-coded when they were workwear or sportswear or leisure wear.

1826 then

These are not sexualised garments. Women’s fit in trousers and shirts/blouses are usually different. Wider hips and more fitted waist. Also, shirts have darts for bust, and shorter waist. If you want fitted clothes that is. Of course, you can wear any shirt or jeans, but the sizes and proportions can be wrong for many women. It is akin to how the Arab men wear their long tunic dress.

Men who wear sexualised women’s clothing (with fake boobies etc). on the other hand… . You don’t see women wearing jeans or chinos with a fake oversized fake penis or cucumber protruding from the front.

If a man is in a single sex space I need to use, his dress sense is not relevant.

None of them chose to wear kilts. If it was just about dresses being more comfortable than trousers…

I was actually thinking about this a few days ago after standing in line at a supermarket behind a man dressed as a woman. He was dressed like Miss Marple apart from the fact that under his 3/4 length skirt he was wearing fishnet tights and court heels, and he had nails so long he couldn't open his wallet to pay for his shopping. I couldn't help but wonder where he had got the idea that this was how to present as a woman, and then I realised it had to be porn.

Regardless of the "why", adopting a transgender persona indicates reductive and disordered thinking about your own sex, the opposite sex or both.

It is impossible to believe you have the mind of the opposite sex without believing some ways of thinking or feeling are only appropriate for one of the two sexes.

But "Man" and "Woman" are descriptions of the body not the mind, so to impose this "sex of the mind" is to impose a sexist framework onto all of us.

Brilliantly put, @FlirtsWithRhinos

The sustained reluctance to grapple with this speaks volumes as well. It seems a very obvious question to me, yet people just nod along with it.

I do, yes. I’ve known him for 20y as part of a community to which we both belong. As a teenager he was a sweet, gentle, troubled, misfit. He is no different as a trans-identified man. Works for local government, which no doubt validates him as ‘a woman’ and insulates him from reality. He’s getting slightly less sweet in his 30s. I wonder whether being accepted without any fuss within our specific community does not fit with the trans narrative. I haven’t talked to him since before the SC ruling.

But, no matter how he looks, dresses or behaves, he needs to stay out of women’s spaces. And I will remind him of that, should I see him trying to use eg the women’s loos. Fortunately our community space has all four types of toilet.

I completely agree that he should not be in women’s spaces.
My question was, I suppose, directly linked to the original op - the idea that the majority of trans men choose to dress is a very particular way.

This. A million times this.

Porn

The vast majority of men who transition or engage in costume-play after 40ish (or become more open at it) do so for fetishist reasons. Whereas younger male transitioners tend to do it for reasons of mental health difficulties resulting from the stress of neurodivergence or homophobia.

I’m pretty sure that my acquaintance falls into the latter category, and Bryon Noem falls into the first category. And that, while neither of them belongs in female spaces, my acquaintance’s presentation choices are inoffensive, a true representation of how he feels comfortable, rather than a parody of femininity. B Noem’s choices are deeply offensive and belong, as with all kink, behind closed doors, in private space, only to be seen by consenting adults.

I suspect this is true, however, it's arguably not a lot differernt than when female people try to appeal to men in how they dress and behave. I'm not sure I'd put it in the same box as cross dressing by straight men where it seems like there is often a massively reductive view of women, a humiliation element, and also some kind of problem with subject/object separation.

In general, if we think about how young people in their teen years come to terms with being sexual people, there is to some extent an internalisation of common social expressions of that. We know we are attracted to men or women, and we want to be attractive to them as well, and there is a way that it translates into an image of our self that takes on some, or maybe a lot, of the social trappings of femininity or masculinity.

Not everyone does it to the same extent, and there are more versions of femininity and masculinity than we sometimes admit, and many are not hyper-sexual. But I think that is a process in adolescence that almost everyone goes through to some extent. It's mostly not done consciously imo either.

But if your sexual interest is more focused on people who are the same sex as you, it's potentially a little more complicated to navigate, and I think you are right, for some gay men who tend to be attracted more to straight men, or have their own discomfort with same sex attraction, cross-sex identification can seem like a way out. Again, not necessarily consciously.

This topic occasionally make the rounds at mumsnet and I think it worth continuing to reengage in it. There was a time not long ago when mentioning, on mumsnet, the fact that most trans women were heterosexual men whose interest in presenting as women had a sexual dimension could only be done obliquely. That in itself made the accusation taboo.

But it is instead a statement of long known fact fact that doesn't necessarily imply a value judgement or call into question the legitimacy of trans identification. We're not surprised that homosexual men and women are only sexually attracted to the same sex. The fact that there's a strong sexual component in gay and lesbian identification doesn't make it less valid. We don't think that because many find the thought of sexual attraction between two people of the same sex unpleasant, that gays and lesbians should be proscribed to be valid reasoning.

The same principle applies to trans identified individuals. Characterising trans identification as a greedy pursuit of unlimited (and unnatural) sexual pleasure is a value judgement and one I would personally dispute as a blanket statement. But acknowledging that for a large number of trans people, especially heterosexual men, presentation as women is the only way they feel they can exist as sexual beings - and humans are sexual beings.

The big difference between homosexuality and trans identification, is that the argument that homosexual relationships are really no different than heterosexual relationship (just same sex) is an attractive one, and the tendency is to apply it to trans individuals: trans women are no different than actual women. That is of course false, trans women are in no sense real women. But it is true that they are not that much different than the average non-trans identified male (because they are men) - that doesn't make them morally objectionable.

And it should be noted that being 'for gay rights' doesn't mean that you must think that gay relationships are exactly like straight relationships (though many do believe that) - those rights stem from principles of autonomy, liberty and privacy not equivalence to heterosexual norms.

Don't, she's absolutely awful in her own right.