Crossdresser or transsexual or something in-between? Is there more to all this than the clothes?
For some, transsexuality is at best a puzzling phenomenon, a curious affliction that some people suffer from. For others, it’s an irresistible force that irreversibly changes your life and that of those you love. For most who are personally acquainted with transsexuality, it’s somewhere in between.
What follow are not definitive answers. Many may seem vague, almost evasive. The point, as much as anything, is to get you to think about these questions too.
So – here are a few more questions we get asked – and some you may want to think about if you see yourself in this.
Only you know the answer to this one. Once you start down the path, it’s very easy to get so caught up in it that you end up rushing headlong into something you may well regret for the rest of your life. The best advice we can give is: Talk. Talk…
For the male-to-female: There are a number of feminising hormones that over time will alter a man’s hair growth, breast development, weight distribution, skin texture and even temperament. The overall effect is to replace male hormones with female ones. In order to achieve this, two things have to happen: the overpowering…
Hormones, as most transgender folk use the term, are substances that feminise or masculinise your physical appearance. The effects range from mild and reversible to obvious and permanent. Hormones are essentially medication. They are (or should be) available by prescription only. They affect many parts of your life – including…
This depends so much on your own situation. If you’re a transsexual who cannot live a peaceful, normal life as long as your body and mind are at odds with each other, the answer is probably yes, you will want to have “corrective surgery” to bring your physical appearance into…
The current belief is that transsexuals, like leaders, are born, not made. In other words, if you’re a transsexual now, you probably always have been, even if you’re just discovering or admitting that. Conversely, people very rarely “turn transsexual”. Note that being a transsexual is different from having a sex…
The short answer: no. What can happen, though, is that if you do have transsexual tendencies, the freedom you experience when you come to terms with your desire to crossdress may unmask those tendencies and free you to explore them.
If you’ve read this far, you’ll have realised that nothing is black and white. There are degrees of intensity. It’s quite possible for someone to be happy simply cross-living, woman at home, man elsewhere. Someone else may choose to take feminising hormones and live full-time as a woman, but not…
This is usually used as an “umbrella” term covering everyone who portrays or experiences some form of gender variance. Thus it includes the drag queens who portray women on stage; crossdressers who like dressing as the opposite gender; and transsexuals who believe they are the opposite gender.
A crossdresser is someone who (for whatever reason) wears clothes conventionally associated with the opposite gender. A transvestite is a crossdresser who learned Latin in school. A transsexual knows that his or her physical body is at odds with his or her inner gender identity.
Transsexuality, as we’ve used it here, refers to the innate, unshakeable conviction that you are in the wrong body. Your plumbing and your wiring, as it were, don’t match. There are many theories as to why this happens. The most likely one is that something happens in utero around 13…