What the sexual fantasies of non-transgender people tell us about the dreams of those who are trans

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Crossdresser, Transgender, Bigender: In Search of an Explanation

A gender variant person explores their gender identity, their sexuality and what has made them who they are, with a special emphasis on being bigender.

By Guest Author Jemimah/Jeremy

Recently I bought my first reasonably lifelike wig. This, together with some good concealer I bought a little earlier, are my first steps towards creating an ‘en femme’ persona which is not laughable. Good – but is it taking me into a different world.

Two or three years ago, when I first realised that I was at least attracted by the idea of crossdressing, I wrote a rather wild note entitled ‘why me, why now’.

I now feel the need to do something more rational and try to work over the ideas which relate to where I am – which I think for the moment is bigender. Lots of wandering the web and reading books has provided lots of theories and opinions and probably most of it is covered somewhere on the Crossdreamers web site but I wanted to work it out myself.

Brain types

Also I wanted my understanding to be based on academic, or at least unemotional, sources.

Identifying people by their genitals is not science

Dr. Ketil Slagstad, the editor of the leading Norwegian medical journal – The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association – gives a good summary of current research on sex and gender in the latest edition.

“Biologically speaking, we all fall somewhere along a spectrum of sexes, of which male and female represent the extreme ends,” he writes and gives succinct summary of the current research front.

“...an increasing amount of knowledge is available with regard to the biological complexity of sex, and proof that the binary sex model finds no support in biology.”

Old men fighting for an old world order

He strongly criticizes  the current attacks against intersex and transgender people:

"The pattern is one of ageing, authoritarian, heterosexual men discriminating against minorities in a wish to appease their voters. There is no room in their world view for the human complexity that actually characterises the societies they are elected to govern; but the ideas of purity that are partly rooted in national conservatism and partly in religious fundamentalism are not echoed by science.“

Indeed, the current backlash against transgender people is partly caused by cynical politicians and religious leaders who are using people's fear of the unknown to forward their own interests.

The suicide rate among FTM transgender youth is much higher than among MTF teenagers. Why?

Here is an article that has made me rethink certain preconceptions about female to male transgender people: "Half Of Transgender Teen Boys Have Attempted Suicide, According To A New Study"

The study, made at the University of Arizona,  says that about 50% of transgender teen boys have attempted suicide at some point in their lifetime. The similar number for transgender teen girls is 29.9 percent and for non-binary youth 41.8 percent.

In comparison, 17.6% of cisgender females and 9.8% of cisgender males had attempted suicide.

Chaz Bono is one of the few truly visible transgender men in the media. Photo: Gage Skidmore.

I must admit that I would have guessed that the attempted suicide rate would have been just as high among male to female transgender youth, as the misogynistic stigma attached to femininity would make the social pressure they face worse.

10 years with Crossdreamers!

The Crossdreamers blog was founded 10 years ago this day. Here's to the next 10!

The first post on this blog was posted on August 24 2008.  The first few paragraphs were:

There are a large number of men out there that have secret dreams about how it would be like to be a woman. 

I am not only talking about the visible ones, the cross-dressers and the transsexuals who have become public figures. 

No, I am also talking about what appears to be "ordinary men", with no immediate plans for sex reassignment surgery or hormone treatments, but who nevertheless harbors feelings that many will find strange and hard to understand.

I promised to  "test any scientific, psychological, religious or philosophical theory that might throw light upon the subject, how far fetched they may be," as well as presenting the thoughts and fantasies of those I later came to call crossdreamers.

And so I did.

Confessions

At its birth the blog was called "Confessions of an Autogynephiliac." A leading American transgender activist told me that the name was bad on at least two levels:  The word "confession" implied guilt, and the word "autogynephiliac" implied support to Ray Blanchards invalidating autogynephilia theory. She was right on both counts.

I had from the very start been very critical of Blanchard's theory, but reckoned that since this was the term people like me would use when searching the internet, it made sense to include it in the title.

I soon realized, however, that the term could not be salvaged or "appropriated" by the transgender community. Sure, it was very important to write about such erotic fantasies, as ignoring  them had caused so much suffering among gender variant people, but the term itself referred to Blanchard's unfounded and misleading explanation for the phenomenon, so it had to go.

Incels, Crossdreamers and Transgender Women

Natalie Wynn, also known as ContraPoints, has posted an interesting video about the relationship between incel culture and the way some crossdreamers and transgender people experience their lives.

Natalie Wynn, AKA ContraPoints

Unless you have been living under a cosy and warm rock for the last few years, you will know that incels, or "involuntary celibates", represents a sub-culture of seriously depressed and self-loathing men who think they are  inevitable losers in the game of love.

They think of themselves  as unattractive and pathetic "betas" who cannot beat the alpha-males regardless of much they try.

This is mostly because feminism has given women too much power, they say. The women can now go for the alpha-males, all the time. And if a woman does marry a "loser," she will always cheat on him with the mentioned alpha "Chad".

The return of skull measurements

All of this despair is sometimes mixed up with a pseudo-scientific philosophy based on old-fashioned phrenology and eugenics, where the shape of your skull tells you whether you are a winner or not.

The idea is that women are attracted to hypermasculine men with hypermasculine skulls. This understanding is based, I  suppose, on quasi-Darwinistic theories where masculine looks signal that the man is a protector with good genes. You know, in the way the male with the biggest tail is the coolest dude on the block in the world of peacocks.

This leads to a psychological no-win situation for those who believe they have a feminine, weak, skull. If this is the case, there seems to be literally nothing you can do to find true love and happiness. Your inferiority is inborn. End of story.