http://www.new-gallery-of-art.com/pdf/xdress/consmenconsdresses.pdf
The Atlantic ran this article in, I believe, its April 2002 issue. It's now become mysteriously hard to find. It's about straight male crossdressers -- autogynephiles. Many of the people described in the article will now, I am sure, be identifying as women due to the explosion of the trans movement. But the underlying phenomenon is the same. These are the kinds of people we are expected to accept uncritically as women.
Some highlights:
"Engineers and accountants, truck drivers and computer programmers, disproportionately represented among the retired military, predominately Christian and predominately conservative (far more moderate Republicans than liberal Democrats), these men go to get-togethers in Kansas City, in Pittsburgh, in Seattle, all over America...
"[A crossdressing Baptist minister's wife]...is not pleased that he is so grateful to her for trying to believe that he cross-dresses only because he cannot express his warm and nurturing self while wearing trousers...
"The men I met were by and large decent, kind, intelligent, and willing to talk openly. Their wives were the same, many of them under the additional pressure of having to make the best accommodation they can to a marriage they did not envision and do not prefer. But I do think that passion for a person, or a capacity to love people, is different from a sexual impulse that is directed toward an object or an act and that is greater than the desire for any person. And although one could argue that all desire focused on an object or even an act is a fetish, I don't think so -- any more than I think that gender-reassignment surgery (even when it's known as gender-confirmation surgery) is no different from a tummy tuck. The greatest difficulty people have with cross-dressers, I think, is that cross-dressers wear their fetish, and the gleam in their eyes, however muted by time or habit, the unmistakable presence of a lust being satisfied or a desire being fulfilled in that moment, in your presence, even by your presence, is unnerving...
"The cross-dressers of Tri-Ess [the Society for the Second Self] insist that cross-dressing is not about sexuality, and therefore not about sex. They are right about the first, and we can all stop assuming that any man who wears a dress is gay. But they are not right about the second, and their assertion, their defense, that cross-dressing is their creative expression of both genders is unsettling, because it is at such odds with their behavior, their natures, and their marriages. These men are as far from being gender warriors and feminists as George W. himself. As one wife said to me, 'For twenty years he couldn't help with the dishes because he was watching football. Now he can't help because he's doing his nails. Is that different?' For these men, the woman within is entirely the Maybelline version, not the Mother Teresa version, not the Liv Ullman version, and not even the Tracey Ullman version. There is no innate grasp of female friendship, of the female insistence on relatedness, of the female tradition of support and accommodation for one's partner and giving precedence to the relationship overall. If there were that kind of understanding, rather than shopping for accessories and watching tapes on how to walk in heels, these guys would be unable to ask their wives to go through this cross-dressing life with them -- and everyone, husbands and wives, knows it. They know that if any of the women insisted on wearing three-piece suits or baseball uniforms in public, and asked their husbands to accept hairy legs, hairy underarms, and jockstraps as part of their sex life, the husbands would not be rushing off to join spousal support groups while cheerfully spending the family's money on bespoke shirts and expensive glue-on facial hair. The marriages would be over."
Submitted June 27, 2019 at 07:41AM by A_D_Tennally https://ift.tt/2XbJqDH
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