I use the pronoun “he.”
I’m a cross-dresser. I’m old-fashioned.
When I was eight or 10, I had fantasies of being a girl. I was always very clear on this : I never thought I really was a girl I just thought I would have been better as a girl – I was always a philosopher. What can I say? I never said, “I’m really a girl and this is what I have to deal with.”
The first time I had contact with another trans person, I was 39 years old. That was in a CompuServe forum. It was the first time trans people were able to talk to each other online.
I’ve always said I would never see the changes in the binary gender paradigm I would like to see in my lifetime. Now I’m not so sure.
One of the things changing all this is parents. They’re starting to realize they can either have a trans child or a dead child. Once they see it that way, there’s no choice in that choice. More young people are getting support. The first thing parents used to do when their six-year-old wanted to wear a dress to school was go to a doctor. Now they can go on the internet and find out they’re not alone and that there are support groups and summer camps.
I cross-dress when I start to feel the longing, but I have to say at my age the mood happens less often. Sometimes I’ve made a commitment to go to a class at York or somewhere else en femme and I think, “Shit, I have to go to all that trouble.” Trust me, I’m a guy who knows it’s a lot harder to look like a girl than a guy. The truth is, I’m an old hippie, and if I were a woman I would not be wearing much makeup. Heels? I haven’t worn them in 20 years. I do like skirts.
I’m thinking of doing a workshop called Not Trans Enough. So many trans people look upon me as a dilettante. Worse yet, cross-dressers are considered annoying little sisters: “They wear too much makeup, they don’t know how to dress properly, they get in the way.”
In being out, I see myself as an educator in the trans world. People can point to the cross-dressing professor and say, “Being a cross-dresser doesn’t make you weird.”
Do you realize that before 1945 there was no sex identification on passports? Why do we have gender on passports? It’s a way of controlling people if you don’t know who’s a woman and who’s a man, you don’t know who to oppress.
And the hysteria over gender-neutral washrooms! There has never been a recorded case of a trans person attacking a non-trans person in a bathroom. Never. I’ve had this checked by lawyers. Yet that’s the big fear: some guy with a skirt and a beard is going to go into a women’s washroom. Crazy.
