From the Editrix

Rachel Rene Boyd
Newsletter Editrix

Minutes of the June 24 Meeting

CHI EPSILON SIGMA

Chair: Terri Lynn Andrews

Vice Chair: Mary Alice Barrett

Treasurer: Nicole Thomas

Secretary: Becky Adams

Since the elections, Nicole has resigned, so the Treasurer’s position is once again open.

Our program for the evening was presented by Nelson Kofie, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Goucher College, Towson, MD. He is currently conducting a research on families in which one spouse, namely the husband, is a crossdresser. Although crossdressers have a social history, their marriages and families have been generally not been studied and represented in marriage and family textbooks. Professor Kofie is interested in learning how couples relate to each other within their marriages when the husband self-discloses his compulsion to dress en femme. His presentation to CES was based on email, telephone, and personal interviews of 12 husbands and 4 wives who are CES members. The following is a synopsis of Dr. Kofie’s presentation prepared by The Wild Rose.

Crossdressing and Marriage

There is very little in the sociological literature about crossdressing in families. Much of the psychological literature, and certainly much of the popular press, has focused on the more extremes forms of crossdressing such as drag queens and transsexuals.

Marriage is by definition a heterosexual relationship. We enter into the marriage relationship with training from birth about what it is to be masculine and feminine. That is part of the socialization process. We are trained in how to exhibit the socially expected expressions of our gender. We are expected to bring these behaviors to marriage, and to pass them on to the children of the marriage.

Crossdressing is in conflict with the expected gender behavior in marriage. Crossdressing raises questions within the marriage about sexuality, not just gender. Husbands may question their masculinity because of their crossdressing. Wives may question not only their husband’s masculinity, but also their own gender identity, fearing that having a crossdressing husband may indicate an element of lesbianism in themselves.

There is often the fear stemming from public discovery of the husband’s crossdressing behavior. The fear of loss of social esteem is paramount. Friends and family could become alienated. Employment could be sacrificed by the discovery of crossdressing. These fears place constraints on the marriage.

Several things happen when the husband has not disclosed his crossdressing compulsion to his wife. Many if not most, couples enter marriage without that disclosure. More probably disclose prior to a second marriage than a first marriage, because many times the husband expects marriage will “cure” his compulsion so he sees no need of pre-nuptial disclosure.

When living with undisclosed crossdressing, the husband experiences guilt and stress for not being able to “cure” himself. Attempts at doing so through purging create additional stress, not the sought after relief. Indeed social stress seems to create the need in a crossdresser to dress for stress relief. Many crossdressers report that they cross dress more frequently during periods of high stress in their life from other sources…job, family, deadlines, financial worries, etc. Purging creates additional apprehension and stress as the crossdresser attempts to put away the one of his mechanisms for coping with life’s stresses.

Men who are living an undisclosed crossdressing life can feel trapped in their marriage. Their attempt to live a wholesome male existence on the “front stage” of life, is frustrated by their compulsion to cross dress in the “backstage” of their life. This creates an estrangement from oneself and one’s spouse.

This frustration and estrangement leads the crossdressing husband to disclose his compulsion to his wife. Sometimes this disclosure is accidental, but many times it is intentional, in an attempt to cope with this estrangement. How a wife finds out about her crossdressing has a lot to do with how she will react to it. Typical reactions are shock, betrayal, hurt, hostility, and disappointment. Often the wife will lose a certain closeness with her husband as she wonders, if he has concealed this from her for so long, what other secrets does he have? This causes some wives to seek revenge, or demand behavioral change. Other wives show some empathy for the husband’s predicament.

There are three fundamental reactions by wives when their husbands disclose their crossdressing:

1) total rejection,

2) partial acceptance, and

3) full acceptance.

Some wives totally reject crossdressing and insist upon divorce. Little is known about the wives who seek divorce as a result of crossdressing. They are generally not available for interviews. So it is difficult to know how they feel and react, other than the obvious.

When wives partially accept crossdressing, there is also a lot of conflict generated. These wives love the man to whom they are married, but hate the practice of crossdressing. They do not see that crossdressing is a part of who he is, not just what he does. Some will insist their husband permanently desist from crossdressing. Others will accept it within limits, but remain ambivalent about it. They continue to worry that friends, neighbors, or employers will find out. Some wives will seek to regulate their husband’s life, putting pressure on him to stop crossdressing.

When wives fully accept crossdressing they become integrated into the crossdressing lifestyle. They attend social gatherings based around crossdressing, and become supportive of the husband’s need to live out his crossdressing compulsion. Some actively coach their husbands in dressing, makeup, and a feminine presentation. When the husbands have this kind of support, it leads to a more stable marriage. This stability may not be generated by the crossdressing support alone, but may be the result of the couple having a mechanism for coping with all kinds of stresses and challenges in the marriage. These fully accepting wives take the approach that “He is straight, and faithful, and still my best friend”.

Even with accepting wives, the crossdressing disclosure ultimately redefines the marriage. The couple does have to work out mutually acceptable limits. Such things as when to dress, where to dress (or not dress), what to tell the children, use of the wife’s clothes, all have to be defined and limited.

Crossdressing also affects the couple’s sexual performance. Many women have difficulty relating to their husbands sexually when the husband is crossdressed. Some adamantly refuse any physical contact when he is crossdressed. They report feeling it is too lesbian like for their comfort. After all, they married a man because they were sexually attracted to a man.

In summary, when wives do accept their husband’s crossdressing:

 They have to rethink their understanding of what is masculine and feminine,

 They participate in crossdressing groups, seeking the companionship of other wives,

 Accept as much crossdressing as they are emotionally able to; and

 Negotiate boundaries for crossdressing.

***If you wish to participate in Dr. Kofie’s research, e-mail (nkofie@goucher.edu) or call (1-800-Goucher) for a questionnaire.

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Moments that Define Us

By the time I was fourteen I had discovered the pleasures of makeup as well as the delight of cocktail dresses, high-heels, nylon stockings, jewelry. Give me an hour, and in fifteen minutes I became, in my mind, a girl. I stayed in this frame of mind for half an hour, measuring the minutes as I paraded before the mirror, then walked from one end of our ranch-style house to the other, pausing now and then to sit on the sofa and delight in the feel and sound of the nylons when I crossed my legs.

When my thirty minutes were up, I erased the evidence of my transformation, putting away the clothes I'd worn, careful to fold them back into my mother's drawers exactly as I'd found them, scrubbing the lipstick from my lips until they were almost raw, wiping away the blusher (rouge, we used to call it), and, at last, with practiced speed, putting back on my boys' clothes. There. One hour. Sometimes my parents and sisters were back on the dot, sometimes a little earlier or later. I was always ready, the only son, my sisters' big brother, sitting at my desk, only slightly breathless, pretending to be absorbed in a book.

It was just child's play, I told myself. By the time I was sixteen I would outgrow it.

Now, some fifty-odd years later, my wife of thirty-seven years has taken a trip with our daughter and granddaughter. I have one week of solitude. What do I do on day one? Dear reader, can there be any doubt?

And tonight, the end of day two, after dutifully running all manner of housekeeping errands, fixing myself a spicy stir-fry dish at the end of the day, all while dressed in masculine attire, I reflect upon this long history of myself as man and woman. After dinner, I go to the bedroom, where I've laid out in the open the garments of my womanhood. My bra hangs from the peg on the wall usually reserved for my Fruit of the Looms. My wig is on the dresser, proud-looking on its stand, immaculately brushed. My women's shoes are out in the open, too, right there on the floor, ready to be stepped into. My earrings lie on top of the dresser, beside my woman's watch, and the ring that belonged to my mother.

And suddenly I'm thinking of her, my mother. She died last year. I was with her every day the last month of her life. I was the last of the family to see her before she died. What a day that had been! I took her to her dialysis treatment. She hated those treatments. They made her cold. I had to pile blankets on top of her afterwards. Her feet were numb. When I left her on that last afternoon, she had me turn the heat on in her room full blast, though it was September and still warm outside. See you later, I said, for my ritual was to eat dinner on my own, then return to her in the evening. She blew me a kiss just before I turned for the door, her custom.

Did she ever know, I wonder (and have wondered many a time)? Did she ever suspect that her son raided her dresser drawers, her clothes closet, her jewelry box? Or if she noticed, at some point, some tell-tale sign--nylons that looked stretched, a bra out of place--did she suspect one of my mischievous sisters instead of her dutiful, well-behaved son?

I'll never know. I know that during that time of her dying, I was for the most part alone, my wife fifteen hundred miles away, my sisters engrossed in their own lives. At night, when I came back to my rented room, having left my mother to the terrors of solitude in a hospital ward, I lay me down to sleep and, God help me, I saw myself a boy of fourteen again, resplendent in a dress that my mother must have worn precious few times, an evening gown, her fox stole wrapped around my slender shoulders. That boy, I realized, was the man I would become. I lay there, trembling in the memory of myself in her clothes, even as she lay in her hospital room, shaken by hallucinations of strangers who sought to push her out of her bed.

And now, alone, my wife having gone to visit her eighty-five year old father fifteen hundred miles away, I see my mother, alone, shivering, gasping for breath. I'm terrified. I want to go to her, tell her again that I love her. I see my wife, my daughter, and my sweet innocent granddaughter as they enter my father-in-law's house. And still I want to say, to nobody in particular, to the world in general, to my mother, yes, to my mother, I took what I could. A robber, a thief, shameless and sly, I would do it again and again. May God have mercy on me.

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Lucy's Window

Last month, I wrote that Joan and I have come to realize that my feminine side is a wonderful gift, and I expressed my wish that everyone reading this column would also come to realize that it is a blessing. But after reading it, I am certain some of you said well that was easy enough for Lucy to say, but it sure doesn't seem like a blessing to me. So this month, I decided to tell you more about how Joan and I reached this conclusion. Next month, I plan to provide a checklist derived from my experience, and I hope it will be helpful to you as you continue your effort to fit cross-dressing into your life.

One of the most difficult parts about being either a CD or the SO of a CD is getting past the societal baggage that each of us acquired during our formative years. Until we do this, it is difficult, if not impossible to accurately assess our own strengths and weaknesses. In my own case, I considered my feminine side as a big weakness for many years. Joan assured me that she accepted me just the way I am, but I thought that I knew better. Surely I reasoned, she really would rather have someone who more closely fit the male stereotype, someone who was "a real man." The result was that my accounting of my own assets and liabilities was grossly out of balance, and I spent years going round and round the cycle that is all too familiar to so many of us: cross-dressing, feeling progressively guilty about it, purging and then starting all over again. Progress toward understanding what cross-dressing was all about was very slow because we remained isolated from other CDs and SOs. Tri-Ess didn't exist when we first started struggling with this issue, and later we feared what exposure would do to my career.

After I retired, I decided to search the Internet to learn more about cross-dressing issues. As a result, I was forced to accept the fact that I was always going to be a cross-dresser, and I decided that I might as well join Tri-Ess and try to get as comfortable with this awareness as I possibly could. Joan and I joined together, and we have found it to be a very rewarding experience. It has been wonderful at chapter meetings to meet other couples with the "same" secret and be able to share experiences. Just coming together with other CDs and SOs was reassuring. The tutorials on makeup, colors, wigs and the like have been helpful to improving my en femme presentation. Although Tri-Ess was a big help, I still had three issues to resolve on my own before, I became completely comfortable with myself and was ready to say that my second self is a real blessing.

After we joined Tri-Ess in 1997, I became increasingly comfortable with being a cross-dresser, but I still had lingering concern. How could I be certain that my cross-dressing was not in conflict with the will of God. Neither Joan nor I felt that I could get an unprejudiced answer from the minister at our church, so I turned to the Internet. There, I found thought-provoking discussions by ministers, rabbis and laymen concerning relative passages in the bible. I also found some of the best articles on this topic in the Femme Mirror. As a result of my research, I have come to the conclusion that cross-dressing is not against God's will unless it is combined with an activity that is violation of the Ten Commandments, as for example cross-dressing to conceal identity during the commission of a crime. For each of us, getting our head's right with God is something very personal, but something I believe that we must do.

I also needed to make certain that I fully considered Joan's feelings. Joan had always been supportive though often less than enthusiastic. Coming together with others and talking at chapter meetings helped me to realize that a problem still existed. True, I had always tried to consider Joan's feelings , always been very careful to make sure she knew she was the only woman in my life and made certain that she had any clothes she needed before I got anything for Lucy, but I always had been so busy feeling guilty about not being the kind of man she should have that I failed to really listen to what she was saying. She had been telling me for years that she was very happy with the man she married, and when I finally paid attention, the feelings of guilt disappeared. However, it took several years for Joan to feel certain that my purges were a thing of the past.

The third thing that I had to do was to make certain that I knew what I needed to be true to myself. I have been richly blessed with a wonderful wife, two very fine sons and five (soon to be six) grandchildren. We have been very fortunate to retire in a very nice community, and we have many friends. But I also have been blessed with a feminine second self, and as a result enjoy cross-dressing as much as possible. So the issue for me was to maintain our comfortable life style while getting the opportunity to cross-dress as often as possible, in other words to make cross-dressing additive to our quality of life.

I told Joan that I would like to cross-dress as often as I could while keeping the risk of disclosure within limits acceptable to both of us. We agreed that I would tell her when I wanted to cross-dress, and she would tell me if she had reservations. Neither of us had any idea of how well it was going to work, but we both knew that communication was the key. We have been doing this for several years now, and for us it works. (By the way, I check periodically with her to make certain she feels that we are still on track.) How well does it work for us? So far, it is working very well, and this year, I have gone out cross-dressed an average of two times per week. There is nothing magic about the frequency with which I cross-dress. It is the frequency with which we are both comfortable given our current circumstances, but we both know that it will undoubtedly change as our circumstances change. Given the many friends we have made in Tri-Ess, the enjoyment and satisfaction I get from cross-dressing, and the closeness that Joan and I have as a result of having worked together to cast off our societal baggage, I have come to feel strongly that my feminine side is a wonderful blessing. Both Joan and I believe that I have now gotten it right, but it took me more than forty years.

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One Wife's Prespective On Cross-Dressing

It was tough during the beginning years because there was very little information on the subject, and I kept trying to put my head in the sand hoping it would go away. Finally, I realized this was one issue that was not going away, and our discussions became a two way street. I don't ever remember not being willing to discuss the subject. Rather, I just got tired of not having any substantive answers. We had to find our own way, and it took a lot of years to find our comfort zone.

Even today when I am tired, hungry or just suffering emotional tiredness and Lucy wants to emerge, my reaction will be, "NO." However, give me a little time to rest or eat and my whole perspective will change, and I will be a whole lot more receptive. As Don says it is all a matter of timing, and neither of us always get it right.

Over all, I have come to enjoy Lucy, even if at times I wish we did not have to deal with issues related to cross-dressing.. But if there were a pill he could take to make it go away, I would NOT want Don to take it because it would mean a change in his personality, and I don't think I would like the person who was left.

I really wish every wife/SO could become more open about cross-dressing issues with her CD, but I also understand that does not always happen. I can only suggest to CDs, be open and above board and show your wife/SO by example that your cross-dressing is not a threat to her and find ways to make her realize she is the number one female in your life. I know sometimes that it is hard for a wife to understand because she feels she should be the only female present in her husband's life. But we married most sensitive men, and without that sensitivity and understanding, we would not love you so much. Cross dressers are truly special people, and I hope someday every wife/SO will come to understand this.

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Official Activites Calendar

NOTES

*CES REGULAR MEETINGS. Our regular monthly meetings will have a program whenever members volunteer to organizing one. Otherwise, there will be no program other than sistership. Some ideas for Monthly Programs are listed on our comprehensive list of possible chapter activities, which is updated and circulated annually. If you would like to have a copy in the interim, please let Vicki know.

CES SPECIAL EVENTS. Some of our sisters have and will continue to organize occasional special events that are in addition to, or sometimes in place of, our regular monthly meetings and programs. Our comprehensive activity list offers some ideas for Special Events that each of us may wish to consider, but anyone may organize any event they wish as long as they notify and schedule it through the CES Activities Coordinator. Vicki Frost is current CES Activities Coordinator. PLEASE NOTE: Special Events held in place of Regular Meetings usually require that members still pay the regular meeting fee. For other Special Events, like our Dinner Dance for spouses, the regular meeting fee may be waived.

OTHER TRANSGENDER EVENTS. Previously, we attempted to include other events in the transgender community herein. However, there are much more comprehensive community calendars maintained on the web, including Tri-Ess' own website, that of the International Foundation of Gender Education (IFGE), and especially the following:

http://www.freetv-tsinfo.com/index699.html

If anyone learns of more comprehensive sites, please let Vicki know and she will include them on our calendars in the future.

CES ACTIVITIES CALENDAR

July 4, 2000

*7/22/00. CES REGULAR MEETING: Women And Cross Dressing During The Civil War. Coordinator: Rita Richards.

*8/26/00. CES REGULAR MEETING: "Surfing And Shopping The Internet."

Coordinator: Charlotte.

Charlotte will tells us about such things as: (1) Security: How to purge the computer of hidden clues about what you've been looking at before your computer whiz kids come to visit. (2) Organization Sites: Tri Ess, CES, Renaissance, Baltimore-Washington Alliance, etc.; (3) Shopping: Auctions and Retail Sales. (4) How To's: Make-Up, Clothing, Voice, etc. (5) Message boards. (6) Chat: Existing CD chat; create a CES chat room. (7) Pictures: Personal web pages. (8) Miscellaneous.

*9/23/00. CES REGULAR MEETING: Speaker Kate Thomas.

Coordinator: Grace Gardener.

Kate Thomas Ph.D., RN Clinical Psychologist and Counselor will talk to us again about her experiences working with cross-dressers. Kate will focus her presentation this year on spousal and SO issues and perspectives.

10/28-29/00. CES SPECIAL EVENT: Annual Halloween Party.

Coordinator: Terri Andrews.

A weekend event has been proposed at Rehoboth Beach. This would be a joint event with Rho Tau.

*11/18/00. CES REGULAR MEETING. Personality-Type Test And Discussion Of Human Communication In The Context Of Differences In Personality Types.

Coordinator: Becky Adams.

Tentative program topic.

12/9/00. CES SPECIAL EVENT: Annual Holiday Party

We need a coordinator and volunteers to form a committee to organize and put on this event. Please contact Vicki if you are willing to be the coordinator for our Holiday Party.

1/20/00? CES REGULAR MEETING. Transgender Rights: Outreach, Education, And Political Advocacy.

Program Coordinator: Victoria Frost.