Transvestites may be normal men frustrated at having to repress part of themselves within the role norms of modern heterosexual conservative culture.
There are many reasons why a man may wish to dress as a female.
It may be from a conviction that he is in a body of the wrong sex, a feeling that could arise from a genetic mismatch, or the frustration of having to repress a part of himself that is not generally accepted in our society.
Some children who are born with ambiguous gender markers are assigned an arbitrary gender and raised as boy or girl with little reference to their genetic heritage. Some are even of dual gender, as in Kleinfelter's syndrome, where both male and female chromosomes are present, but the extra chromosome causes infertility. Current counselling often advocates the decision to eliminate either the male or the female option, often by surgery and effectively murder one of the two individuals assumed to be occupying the same body.
But the human genotype consists of 46 chromosomes, of which males and females have 45 in common. The 46th chromosome makes all the difference in how society trains the individual who is perceived as male. Until recently, in many societies, including Great Britain before the second world war, boys were raised identically to girls for the first years of their lives.
Boys wore long hair and were dressed as girls. A music hall song from the 1930s, entitled “The Little Shirt My Mother Made for Me” details the adventures of a little boy when he was first put into knickerbockers after the comparative freedom of wearing frocks.
In other cultures, boys were raised as girls until puberty in order to fool evil spirits who would target boys, an explanation of the known prevalence of infant deaths amongst young males. This was encouraged by an ethnic characteristic which ensured that in most cases a boy's testicles remained invisibly inside his body and did not descend until puberty.
“Only a man knows how he wants a female to dress”. Some men are so sure they could make a better job of being a sex object that they dress outrageously in skin-tight latex sheaths, basques, stockings, and high heeled shoes, often in contradiction of luxurious facial hair and macho tattoos.
Others genuinely want to pass as females, some for the thrill of avoiding detection, or even courting danger in districts where such exhibitionism is unwise. Others want to explore the experience of being a female, either to escape for a time from the responsibilities of their male self, or to delight in the sensual pleasures of fabric, costume, perfume and maquillage. Or they may lack confidence in their ability to attract a heterosexual mate and so become their own ideal women, the mothers who rejected them, or the lovers who spurned them.
Some dream of being forced to dress and act as a cissy maid, submitting to the will of another in order to allow themselves to do what they could not otherwise permit themselves to experience.
Today, it is becoming respectable to cross-dress as a way of flaunting one's personality as an entertainer, or “camp it up” as a recognised homosexual, abrogating the right to be both male and beautiful.
But women are still threatened by their lack of understanding of the heterosexual mate who pays them the supreme compliment of wanting to wear their clothes, to get inside their skin and understand what it is really like to be the woman he loves.
