Interview with a Love Shy Crossdreamer

Last year I was contacted by a young male to female crossdreamer from Britian, who wanted to ask me some questions about how to cope with being gender variant. The conversation ended with me asking her a few questions. 

Photo: Hramovnick

(I am using female pronouns on her request).

The more I learn about crossdreamers, the more I realize that this is a diverse group of people. That is: You cannot make up a profile that fits all crossdreamers, in the same way there is no pattern of personality that fits all women or all men, all Europeans or all Asians.

(This also means, of course, that crossdreaming most likely is not the end result of one particular type of psychological event.)

Still  some crossdreamers have more in common than others. Some, for instance, tackle their gender variance by isolating themselves socially.

Q: We have been chatting a bit about crossdreaming and loneliness over at facebook, and I would love to share some of your reflections with my readers. Could you say a few words about where you stand today?

Jennifer replied:

"I live at home with my parents and I work, I really want to cross dress and find someone who truly gets me but I'm worried about being mocked etc."

And that sentence sums up, as we will see,  Jennifer's major challenge quite nicely.

Q: I know that for you crossdressing has been one way of expressing "your other side". Could you say some more about what role crossdressing plays in your life?

Jennifer tells me that for her crossdressing has been an important outlet for crossdreamer feelings:

"Cross dressing helps me be the real me or Jennifer as I've come to know myself. It's like I hear her calling me to express who I really am and I love it, I need it."

A Creative Crossdreamer Vocabulary, from "Dark Crossdreamers" to "Misaffirmation"

Here is the second part of my new Crossdreamer Dictionary. You can read the first entry here!

Crossdreamers are men and women who get excited by the idea of being the other sex. In this series I try to present imaginary (and not so imaginary) terms that can help us understand what crossdreaming is about.

Dark crossdreamers*

Some crossdreamers have suppressed
their other side completely.
Photo: michele piacquadio

Dark crossdreamers are people who have managed to suppress their transgender side completely. They are not even aware of splitting (i.e. a mental compartmentalization of their other side).

The dark crossdreamers are as mysterious and invisible as dark matter, although some dark crossdreamers may have a breakthrough, as the suppressed side forces its way to the surface. This is why we know they exist.

The existence of dark crossdreamers makes it impossible to determine how large a proportion of the human population is actually crossdreamers.

Dysphoric

Dysphoric crossdreamers feel a strong sense of misalignment between their bodies and their minds. Quite often they will feel completely alienated from their own bodies and the gender role they are forced to play. They only manage to live the "normal" lives of someone assigned to their birth sex through great sacrifice. Many of them will end up transitioning.

In spite of what some  would like you to believe, most transsexual men and women have been crossdreamers.

Erotic dissonance

Crossdreaming or being turned on by something (song, movie scene, etc.) that is not meant to be sexual but simply funny, exciting, etc.

(Hat tip to Hagia Sofia)

Euphoria*

Euophoria is the intense sense of joy a crossdreamer may feel when he or she is able to express his or her hidden side. This may be male to female crossdresser's joy of wearing feminine attire, the female to male crossdressers mischievous sense of power from "packing", or it may be the emotional release that comes from writing a story, a caption or a comic that make perfect sense.

Euphoria is related to soaring.

On Gilmartin's love-shy men and the male lesbian (Part 2)

In this post I take a look at the factors that may be causing love-shyness and the birth of male lesbians.

In my post On Gilmartin's love-shy men and the male lesbians (Part 1) I presented Dr. Brian G. Gilmartin's book from 1987: Shyness & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment.

Love-shy people are men and women who find it extremely hard to approach the other sex, in spite of the fact that they long for such a relationship more than anything else.

Many of the love-shy men included in Gilmartin's study describe themselves as male lesbians. A male lesbian is a heterosexual man who wishes that he had been born a woman, but who (even if he had been a woman) could only make love to another woman and never to a man.

Although Gilmartin does not cover crossdreaming or autogynephilia, and in spite of the fact that he is adamant about these men not being crossdressers, there are enough similarities to justify a more thorough discussion. I have had many comments and emails for men who identify as love-shy and male lesbians and who are also crossdreamers (autogynephiles) and/or crossdressers.

Note, however, that not all crossdreamers and crossdressers are love-shy men. Far from it. Many of them are outgoing and even promiscuous. But there seem to me there is some correlation between feminization, shyness and crossdreaming.

In this post I am going to look into Gilmartin's ideas about the origins of the love-shy men. The reason I decided to write a post about Genes, hormones, genes and gender identity before publishing this post, is that there are great similarities between Gilmartin's theory from 1987 and current ideas about hormones causing such variation.

In other words: If you have not read that post already, now may be a good time.

Nature and nurture

Gilmartin believes that love-shyness is a learned personality trait that is based on an inborn temperament. In other words: love-shyness is the result of an interaction between biological and psychological drivers.

The love shy is introvert by nature. This is a common trait among homo sapiens, and for most people being introvert does not cause too much trouble. In the case of the love-shy man, however, it stops him from establishing a relationship with a woman.

A love-shy man has also an inborn low anxiety threshold. He experiences anxiety much more frequently, and much more intensely and painfully than a person with a high or normal anxiety threshold.

Gilmartin again:

"(...) there are two inborn components: one is the high emotionality (low anxiety threshold); the second component is inhibition/introversion. When a person is very high on both emotionalityand introversion (...), the chances are exceedingly good within the context of American society that he will develop into a chronically love- shy individual."

Some of the psychological and social problems of the love-shy men could be considered autistic because of the men's trouble in regards to peers, social interactions, and adjustment to change. Years later when asked in an email, Gilmartin felt that 40% of severely love-shy men would have Asperger syndrome.

The causes of love-shyness

Gilmartin suggests there is correlation between and love-shyness and different conditions, including low maternal testosterone during fetal development, nasal polyps, and hypoglycemia. His point is that natal development may lead to the development of an avalanche of different symptoms, many of whom are found among a significant number of love-shys.

Of special interest for crossdreamers is his reflections on the role of pre-natal testosterone (ps 57):

"If the brain of a fetus is left alone, it will develop into a female brain regardless of whether or not it is exposed to feminizing hormones. Inessence, this is one of the myriad reasons why the male is a more delicate organism than the female. Many more things can go wrong in male fetal development than in female fetal development.

As I noted in the gene post this is a common view also today. The female blueprint is the default one. Nature turns you into a male by adding masculinizing and defeminizating hormones.

People like Roughgarden disagrees, and says that both male and female gonad development are caused by a mix of processes that turns female and/or male development on and off. This does not make much of a difference in this context, as the idea that hormones in the womb influences sexual development is the same.

Jogols pointed me to an post on the cause of homosexuality and transgenderism that explains this in more or less the same way as Gilmartin.

Gilmartin again:

"Unless the male fetus is exposed to masculinizing hormones plus the enzymes which permit each of these hormones to work on various sections of the brain, that male fetus will develop a brain that is in at least some ways feminine. The number of ways in which it will be feminine will be determined bythe number of sections of the developing brain that had been deprived of the appropriate masculinizing enzymes. Again, the enzymes permit the male hormones to do their masculinizing job."

So although Gilmartin uses a somewhat different terminology, his story fits well with current biology.

Gimartin continues:

"...There are different sections of the fetal brain that need to be masculinized. And each of these sections calls for the propitious operation of a different enzyme. Some sections of the brain have to do with sexual/romantic directionality. When these brain sections are inadequately masculinized, the person stands a good chance of becoming a pre-homosexual or a pre-bisexual little boy. "

Two influential contemporary researchers on gender and biology, Aliicia Garcia-Falgueras and Dick F. Swaab, argue that the fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge.

They say:

" In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in extreme cases in trans-sexuality.

"This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation."

("Sexual Hormones and the Brain: An Essential Alliance for Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation", Pediatric Neuroendocrinology. Endocr Dev. Basel, Karger, 2010, vol 17, pp 22–35)

They are talking about gender identity here, not love-shyness, but it is not hard to see the relationship between the various forms of "feminine" or "non-masculine" men.

Gynephiles and androphiles

Gilmartin does differentiate between gynephilic (woman-loving) and androphilic (man-loving) non-masculine boys. He divides the gynephilic (heterosexual) boys into two sub-categories: Some of them are effeminate, some of them are not.

One of the major differences between Gimartin's love-shy men and Blanchard and Bailey's autogynephiliacs is that Blanchard and Bailey make a point out of the autogynephiliacs not being effeminate. For Bailey all effeminate men are "homosexual transsexuals". Woman-loving autogynephiliacs look and act in a masculine manner.

Gilmartin, on the other hand, argues that gynephilic (heterosexual) boys may very well be effeminate:

"Other brain sections have to do with effeminacy. When these are not masculinized, the person becomes an effeminate little boy. And contrary to popular impression, most effeminate men are NOT homosexual. Because of a specific enzyme deficiency during their prenatal period, they become effeminate heterosexuals. And most of them, like heterosexuals generally, will marry and become fathers. But because of rigid and often uncompromising gender role expectations for males, they will suffer much teasing and hazing throughout their formative years as a result of their effeminacy."

Different types of femininity

There can be several reasons for the difference between Gimartin's postition regarding gynephilic effeminate boys and the one of Blanchard and Bailey.

It could be that Blanchard's and particularly Bailey's discussion of effeminate gays and masculine woman-loving autogynephiliacs is based on a projection of their own prejudices. In other words: they see what they want to see. It is certainly true that this part of the autogynephilia theory is the least scientific one.

Blanchard and Bailey base their theory on the observation of transwomen and M2F transgendered seeking surgery. I suspect their impression is caused by the fact that gynephilic transsexuals -- on average -- transition much later than the androphilic ones. Older women look less feminine than younger ones. Moreover, late transitioners have spent a life time trying to live as men, picking up their mannerisms in the process.

But it could also be that Gilmartin has a view of being feminine that is much broader that Blanchard and Bailey's. For Gilmartin this is more than effeminate looks and mannerism. It is also a matter of stereotypical female interests and a lack of male typical assertiveness.

Gilmartin elaborates on this:

"(p. 58) Now, another section of the brain has to do with social assertiveness, competitiveness and drive—the opposite of 'feminine' passivity. And this is the brain section which has a very strong bearing upon shyness generally, and especially upon love-shyness and the behavioral inertia that typically accompanies it.

"The nonassertive, unaggressive little boy will commonly develop non-masculine interest patterns. In essence, he violates traditional gender role expectations in terms of interests and preferences rather than in terms of either effeminacy or in terms of homosexuality or erotic orientation. For example, he will prefer quiet, non-physical forms of play; working with arts and crafts, music and theatre arts, dolls and figurines, etc., all of which relate in different ways to violation of gender role expectation.

Friends, family and foes expect effeminate boys to be homosexual, and classify them as such.

"The shy, passive boy is very often mislabeled 'homosexual' just as the effeminate boy is perhaps even more often mislabeled 'homosexual'. Conservative and rigid people tend to apply the label 'homosexual' to any young boy who violates traditional gender role expectations, just as these same people commonly affix such labels as 'communist' and 'unAmerican' to any person who espouses a political, social or religious attitude or belief with which they happen to disagree."

The sliders of gender development

Like Natalie and me Gilmartin ends up with a model consisting of a large number of variables that may lead to the development of non-typical behavior and interests:

"To be sure, occasionally a number of different enzymes will malfunction while a child is intra utero. And in that case the child (if male) will develop a number of different problems. For example, he may develop BOTH effeminacy AND homosexuality. Or he may develop BOTH effeminacy and chronic shyness. Or he may develop chronic shyness and homosexuality. And in a few rare cases he may develop all three of these separate problems."

Trying to reduce gender identification to one or two variables is therefore impossible. There are not two types of non-masculine born men in this narrative (gynephilic vs. androphilic), but rather a large number of possible combinations of traits. Trying to force them all into a model based on on only one of these variables -- sexual orientation in the case of Blanchard and Bailey -- is to oversimplify the matter.

An explanation for the development of love-shyness

Gilmartin has no final explanation for the variation of hormone and enzyme levels. He does point to some East German research of the time that indicated that there is a strong relationship between a pregnant woman's state of mind, and her male fetus' blood testosterone level. Certain personality traits of a pregnant woman had the effect of neutralizing either the testosterone that is released into the bloodstream of the fetus, or the enzymes which metabolize the testosterone to the point of permitting it to do its job on the various parts of the male. (p. 145).

As far as I know, this theory has not been completely abandoned by modern biologists. There are those that argue that the emotional or physical state of the mother can influence the development of the fetus.

Alicia Garcia-Falgueras and Dick F. Swaab point to several possible factors that may explain variation in gender identity and sexual orientation. Contemporary research indicates that the chance that a boy will be homosexual increases with the number of older

brothers he has:

"This phenomenon is known as the fraternal birth order effect and is putatively explained by an immunological response by the mother to a product of the Y chromosome of her sons. The chance of such an immune response to male factors would increase with every pregnancy resulting in the birth of a son."

Like Gilmartin they consider the emotional state of the mother:

"A stressed pregnant woman has a greater chance of giving birth to a homosexual son. An interesting hypothesis is that the changes in androgen concentration during pregnancy as a result of environmental stress factors may influence the fetal central nervous system as an adaptive adjustment to the environment"

Needless to say, this may also have consequences for the development of other traits linked to our understanding of gender role: introversion/extroversion and level of aggressiveness included.

Resources:

Download Dr. Gilmartin's Shyness and Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment

The Love Shy Survival Project

Love-shyness on Wikipedia

Love-shy.com

Love shyness: the 'condition' crippling men (Times Online)

Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden

Sex Differences: Developmental and Evolutionary Strategies by Linda Mealey
Male lesbian - it happens Examiner.com

A Male Lesbian Whose Appeal Is Mainly Cerebral (on British Comedian Eddie Izzard identifying as a male lesbian)

Chastity Tube on Male Lesbians

Aven discussion on male lesbians

T-shirt from zazzle

Dr. Brian G. Gilmartin: Shyness & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment, chapter om male lesbians
Lesbian Trapped In A Man's Body (Fine Art America)

On Gilmartin's love-shy men and the male lesbians (Part 1)

In 1987 Dr. Brian G. Gilmartin published a book called Shyness & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment (available for free online), which presented the term "male lesbian".

It is probably the "male lesbians" that makes the book especially interesting for the readers of this blog, as many of you are woman-loving men who'd love to take the role of the woman in the sexual act.

However, when reading many of the crossdreamer life stories I find in this blog, in emails and in research I also see that there are a lot of socially inhibited persons among the crossdreamers/autogynephiliacs.

Not all biologically male crossdreamers find it hard to approach women. Nor are all love-shy men into feminization fantasies, but there seem to be an interesting overlap that deserves further study.

Well researched

Shyness & Love is a well researched book. It gives a good overview of the research on shyness up till that time, and also includes an original and extensive survey of what he calls "love-shy men".

The fact that it also contains chapters on astrology, karma and reincarnation, however, means that it has not been given the attention it probably deserves by other experts in the field. Any association with "New Age" is a kiss of death in traditional scientific circles. However, the book makes sense even if you disregard the few "unorthodox" parts of the publication, so I believe it deserves to be taken seriously.

Moreover, many "love-shy" men have embraced the book, as it is one of the few that seems to make sense of their lives. That means a lot to me.

Who are the love-shy?

Gilmartin explains that love-shy people are men and women who find it extremely hard to approach the other sex, in spite of the fact that they long for such a relationship more than anything else.

In his study Gilmartin only includes heterosexual men.

There are six criteria for being a love-shy man, according to Gilmartin:

• You are a virgin.
• You rarely go out socially with women more than just friends.
• You have no history of any emotionally close, meaningful relationships of a romantic and/or sexual nature with any member of the opposite sex.
• You have suffered and is continuing to suffer emotionally because of a lack of meaningful female companionship.
• You have become extremely anxiety-ridden over so much as the mere thought of asserting himself vis-a-vis a woman in a casual, friendly way.
• You are strictly heterosexual in your romantic and erotic orientations.

In a modern Western cultural context most of the love-shy are men, as women are not -- to the same extent -- expected to be assertive in love.

Gilmartin makes the following argument:

"In American society some degree of shyness is considered tolerable and even quite socially acceptable in females. In males of all ages from kindergarten through all the years of adulthood, in contrast, shyness is widely viewed as very deviant and highly undesirable. Moreover, shyness in males inspires bullying, hazing, disparaging labeling, discrimination, etc. In females shyness is often looked upon as being 'pleasantly feminine' and 'nice'."

Shy women are just as likely as non-shy women to date, to get married, and to have children, according to Gilmartin. Love-shy men find it much, much harder to lose their virginity, find love and get married.

I am not sure love-shy women find life as easy as Gilmartin may imply, but there is a difference, and that difference tells us a lot about the main problem of the love shy man: Society expects him to be assertive, proactive and adventurous vis-a-vis women. By nature, however, this man finds it extremely hard to live up to this stereotypical image of what it means to be a man. He is shy and introvert and would prefer to play the traditional role of the woman in the game of courtship.

He is a prince waiting in his castle. In a fair world the beautiful girl would come riding like a female warrior in shining armor. She would open the door and wake him with a kiss. Given the gender roles of modern day America or Europe, this scenario seldom adds up. He is sitting alone in his emotional fortress, while the love of his life sits brooding in another castle, unless -- of course -- Dr. McDreamy has not already broken down her walls and swept her off her feet. McDreamy often does.

Gilmartin believes that as many as 1.5 percent of American males are love-shy.

Love-shy factors

Gilmartin has a long list of factors that make love-shy men different from other men. It may seem like a haphazard kind of list, including far too many variables, but I think he is on to something. It makes sense to me that there is a group of men who have many of these factors in common, maybe because I have been one of them myself.

Relationships

On the relationship to women and men:

• they often feel women are more privileged than men
• they place great, often disproportionate importance on physical beauty (especially facial beauty)
• they like girls, but are afraid to talk to them because they're very afraid of rejection
• they develop interest in females at an earlier age than usual, particularly in the third to fifth grade range
• they most often only want to have female children
• they are not as likely to be interested in male friendships as non-shy men
• most of the love-shy men, but none of the non-shy men in Gimartin's survey, report that they have never had any friends
• they have been bullied by children their own age due to their inhibitions and interests
• they have normally completed higher education, but...
• they have often unstable careers and have salaries below the average

The interests of the love-shy:

• they are in below-average physical shape as a group
• they tend to be less interested in sports
• they tend to be more interested in movies and music, and prefer watching different types of movies from non-love-shy men (e.g. more romances)

The psychology of the love-shy:

• they often have a hard time expressing their emotions
• they are sometimes passive aggressive
• they are melancholic
• they were usually quiet as infants, while non-love-shy men are rarely so
• they are often very serious
• they are easily upset
• they are often poorly adjusted, unhappy with their lives and have a high in rates of anxiety disorders
• they have often more violent fantasies, and are very pessimistic and cynical about the world

The birth family of the love-shy:

• they have often had a physically difficult birth
• they have often had tense, nervous, angry and/or two-faced mothers who disallowed dates with girls
• they often have no sisters, and rarely have more than one
• they often had no adults to turn to for emotional support as children, and continue to be that way as adults
• they often felt they had little influence on family decisions as children
• they have demanding parents who invade their privacy
• they have often been physically abused by their parents
• they often go through an excessive amount of psychological trauma
• their parents were overprotective
• they grew up in isolation
• their parents and pressured them into being "real boys"

Non-masculine gender role identification

Love-shy men do not identify with the typical male gender role of modern Western society. In fact, they hate it. Gilmartin argues that love-shys usually renounce aspects of the masculine sex-role stereotype.

"Love-shy men hate football, baseball, basketball, weight-lifting, beer-drinking, swearing and carousing with same-sexed assoctates, etc. They are far more likely to be interested in 'settling down', and in the sorts of things women are likely to be interested in."

Love-shy men do not normally hide their hatred of the stereotypical male role. Gilmartin is probably right when he says that such honest and open self-revelation frightens women away when it occurs early on in a relationship.

Moreover, expressed disinterest in and hostility towards prototypically "masculine" sex-role activities and interests is also quite likely to be regarded as weird and strange by a woman. Indeed, one of his points is that the love-shy men may appear strange and socially awkward.

The male lesbian

Gilmartin does not write about crossdreaming or autogynephilia in the way I have presented this in this blog. He does not focus on the erotic fantasies of the love-shy, so I have no way of proving that there is an overlap between his category and the crossdreamers.

Still, there are some very interesting similarities. This is what he says about a sub-category of the love-shy men (p.125):

"...a 'male lesbian' is a heterosexual man who wishes that he had been born a woman, but who (even if he had been a woman) could only make love to another woman and never to a man. Unlike the transsexual, the 'male lesbian' does not feel himself to be 'a woman trapped inside the body of a man'. Moreover, none of the love-shy men studied for this research entertained any wishes or fantasies of any kind pertinent to the idea of obtaining a sex change operation. All wanted to keep their male genitalia; all wanted to remain as males. However, all deeply envied the perogatives of the female gender and truly believed that these perogatives fitted their own inborn temperaments far more harmoniously than the pattern of behavioral expectations to which males are required to adhere."

Since they could not be a woman, most of them visualized themselves as a man romancing a beautiful woman.

" He is a person who had always felt rather strange, detached, and disinterested around age-mates of his own gender, and who had always entertained the fantasy that if he could only win acceptance from an all-girl peer group he could feel 'at home' there. The 'male lesbian' state of consciousness may be related to inborn temperament, and may at least partly explain why the love-shy men tended to have become very romantically attracted to girls from an early point in life."

Note that in his survey Gilmartin focused on heterosexual male virgins. He deliberately excluded homosexual men from his study:

"Interestingly, 94 percent of the love-shy men who were interviewed for this study turned out to be strong believers in homosexual rights. Yet at the same time every single man interviewed for this study indicated disgust at the mere thought of kissing or making love to another man... Loving and romancing a beautiful woman was the only thing many of these deprived men ever seemed to think about in their almost incessant fantasies and daydreams."

So, the male lesbian does not want to play with males, does not want to experience sex with males, and does not have male recreational interests. He is actually so alienated from the very idea of being a man that he does not even want to procreate male children:

"The vast majority of the love-shy men interviewed for this book confessed that if they ever did become fathers they would want to have girl children only—NO BOYS. In stark contrast, only one percent of the self-confident, non-shy men felt that way. In fact, the non-shy men preferred the idea of fathering male children to the idea of fathering female children by a ratio of almost three to two."

My guess is that he finds the very idea of tackling a rough and tumble boy impossible. After all; He fears them or even detests them. Or maybe he does not believe that he can serve as a good role model for such a boy, and that the kid would end up in the same situation as himself.

Love-shyness and crossdreaming/autogynephilia

Gilmartin argues that the love-shy men studied for his book all reluctantly accepted the fact that they are males. He says that none of them had ever revealed any transvestite tendencies:

"...none of them had ever experienced any urge to dress up as a woman or to put on lipstick or nail polish, etc." (p. 126)

He has not asked them about erotic feminization fantasies in general, however. The concept of autogynephilia had not been invented when he wrote the book, so it would be hard for him to ask. In fact, his understanding of transsexuals is also somewhat simplistic, as he seems to believe that all transsexuals are androphilic. This is not correct.

I suspect there may be crossdreamers among his respondents. The fact that I have had several emails from love-shy men urging me to write a post like this one, strengthens this belief, as does the fact that I recognize myself in many of Gilmartin's descriptions.

I need to stress, however, that from what I see in the research and from the comments made at this and other blogs and in other forums, there is no reason to believe that all crossdreamers or autogynephiliacs are love-shy male lesbians. Many crossdreamers report an active sex life from a very early age. Some of them are promiscuous, even, and a large number of them get married and have children.

All of this points to an underlying variation where love-shyness may be one of many factors that can be associated with crossdreaming.

Gilmartin gives an explanation for love-shyness that may give us an indication for why this is so. That's the topic for my next post.

Postscript on male lesbians:

Note that the term male lesbian has been used for men who are clearly not love shy, or who at least are not love-shy anymore.

The British comedian Eddie Izzard (pictured right) calls himself a lesbian trapped in a man's body. He may perfectly well be a crossdreamer, but it would be very hard for a love-shy to go on stage like that.

The "male lesbian" Lisa from the American TV series The L Word is definitely not love-shy!

Go to part 2 of this post!

Resources:

Download Dr. Gilmartin's Shyness and Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment

The Love Shy Survival Project

Love-shyness on Wikipedia

Love-shy.com

Love shyness: the 'condition' crippling men (Times Online)