What’s Inside?

By Barbara Van Horn

This newsletter is a labor of love for each of our contributing editrixes. Please join the staff by submitting your own insights into the world of cross-dressing. You can send your input to Rachel.Boyd@adelphia.net, or R. R. Boyd, P.O. Box 2252, Ashburn, VA 20146-9152.

Executive Committee 2002-2003

zoom@paonline.com

graceces@hotmail.com

ashley_grants@hotmail.com

linda_sullivan51@hotmail.com

beckyxd@hotmail.com

*Non-voting members

For you rocket scientists out there, we don’t have any minutes this month because our January meeting was cancelled by inclement weather. Some of us are going to make up for missing this meeting by going to Williamsburg to meet with Rho Tau on March 15. The Chi Epsilon Sigma monthly meeting will be March 22, featuring the "History of Chi Epsilon Sigma", by Grace Gardener, our Founding Sister

Most regular chapter meetings are held on the fourth Saturday of each month. Sometimes adjustments are made for holidays, so always consult The Wild Rose for the latest updates. The schedule for 2003 is:

February 22	Open forum discussion: "Realizing You Are Not Alone"
March 15	Meeting in Williamsburg with Rho Tau
March 22	"History of Chi Epsilon Sigma", by Grace Gardener, our Founding Sister
April 26	A movie from the C E S archives
May 17	Open forum discussion: "How Do You Explain".
June 28	TBA
July 26	Picnic
August 23	Picnic
September 20	Dr. Kate Thomas, Gender Therapist
October 25	Halloween Party
November 22	TBA
December 13	Holiday Party

This discussion will deal with two aspects of our hobby that some of you may have experienced at one time or another. I will not try to draw any conclusions; instead, I will let the reader do that on his (or her) own, because everyone has their own limits and agenda.

The first topic deals with our wardrobe. Some have a simple wardrobe. You could fit everything they own into a suitcase. I have one friend who used to keep his entire wardrobe in the trunk of his car! At the other end of the spectrum, you have people who rival Emelda Marcos and her shoe collection. How much do you consider too much? How many shoes, dresses, or wigs do you have? How much do you spend on your collection? Are you the kind to spend $300 on one good wig, or do you have half a dozen $50 wigs?

I met a fellow Tri-Ess’er from the St. Paul, MN group on one of my trips to Minneapolis. He has one $300 human hair wig. He was surprised to find out that I have over a dozen. Admittedly, mine are not of the same quality as his, but what the heck. Do you do Payless, or Manolo Blahnik? Go the Payless route and you can get 20 for the price of one. I have somewhere around 200 pairs of shoes and boots. Do you think that is excessive? When my wife and I had an addition built for her folks, I specified in my drawings a 12 by 20 storage area in the attic with a 6-½ foot ceiling. I had one purpose in mind for the space--to build an empire for Shana. And so it is. There is a 20-foot of storage space along the one wall for Shana (and her sluttier sister Hollii) for just my dresses, which at last count, were somewhere around 350.

Some of us like certain aspects of our hobby more than others. I think the shrinks refer to this as a fetish. What’s yours? Mine is shoes. I can’t go into a shoe store without buying something. One CD friend of mine said "I’ve got two pairs of shoes and that suits me fine.....what can you possibly need all those shoes for?" Variety honey, variety! I also like evening gowns, wedding dresses, and wigs. Other common fetishes are lingerie, anything made out of Angora, and leather (I know there’s a lot more, I’m just saying, "for instance"). In self defense, because I can see the cards and letters flying.....if I weren’t being excessive with this "hobby", the money would be going into one of the many other ones I have. I could have my own airplane instead of having to rent one. I could have one heck of a model railroad. I could be driving a Bimmer instead of a Kia. I’d be spending it somewhere, so it might as well be for Shana’s, simply because I probably have more fun with crossdressing than with any of my other hobbies.

Part two of this discussion deals with going out en femme. It seems like the more you do it, the more you want to do it. It’s like an addiction in its worst form. You can get so wrapped up in it; it’s hard to see the situation for what it is. Compare it to falling in love. You see it one way, those looking at it from an outsiders point of view can probably see it a lot more clearly. Back in the late 80's, I was going out en femme on an average of two or three times a week! And then I got married. Even though my wife knew about my "hobby" from the beginning, I had to respect her need for a somewhat "normal" lifestyle. So Shana would only come out for a few meetings and theater events. Although my last job allowed me the convenience of being dressed around the house, since I worked out of the home, I tried to NOT let it take a hold of me the way it did in the 80's. Until this past Halloween.

I went out en femme on Halloween day to have acrylic nails put on, and I didn’t take them off for three weeks. Not wanting to let them go to waste, Shana went out on eleven occasions. Two outings were road trips, one coming back from Rehoboth, DE, and the other coming back from Scranton, PA (and, BTW, on both trips, I got pulled over by the railroad police, but that’s another story). Another was a Saturday trip to the Towson mall with Marcia (where some high school kids called us freaks). Lately, I have been going out, two, three, maybe as many as five times a month with meetings and Tuesday night dinner rendezvous with Marcia. After the rush of the Halloween season, doing it only once or twice a month seems like quite a let down. How much is too much? It depends on your situation. How those around you deal with it is the biggest factor. If you live by yourself, you could do it every day. If you’re married, with children, once a month may be a lot. Even with an accepting wife, I have to tread lightly. You can’t forget the WE part of the relationship. A couple of years ago, there was a 20-20 type show that featured a CD’er who dressed ALL the time around his family. If I remember correctly, he didn’t, or couldn’t do IT at work, but he did it whenever he was at home, even when they had picnics and get togethers with their friends. I don’t remember if he ventured out of the safety of his home en femme. Personally, I feel that is going too an extreme, and it shows a lack of respect for his family (that in of itself is another topic of discussion). Some may feel my Halloween outings extreme. How much do YOU think is too much?

To tie the two topics together, I would like to point out that crossdressing is something you can do while you are busy with other things you like to do. For example, I’m into ham radio, and I just discovered that there are quite a few of us out there who love crossdressing and radio (have to thank Ebay for discovering this connection). How about trains, anyone else like them as much as I do out there? I know a lot of y’all are into that and crossdressing (and then there are hams into trains, and it just gets more complicated from there!). I go out taking pictures of trains often as Shana (that’s where I ran into the trouble I mentioned earlier). Shopping, I love to do that too. Again, no problem doing that as Shana. If I’m sitting around and playing with my computer, isn’t it a whole lot more fun to do as Shana....you bet! So, is there a point to all of this? Probably not, for what is excessive for one person isn’t extreme for another. As humans, we love to criticize, in fact, it’s one of the things we do best, but try not to be too critical of others. If I can come to any conclusion from all of this, it is the following: Be kind to your fellow crossdresser, for after all, we’re all just doing what we like to do with the hobby, each in our own little way!

By Sue Avalon

While "dressed" and out with my spouse this fall and winter, I enjoyed some new experiences. They included shopping at department and specialty stores and having some very good meals at several nice restaurants. Here are some things I heard for the first time this year while "dressed":

The last one was from a very caring elderly lady and is my favorite.

Making Up Is (Not) Hard To Do

Looking our best takes some effort. OK. It takes a lot of effort. I’ve set out to learn something about how to use make up to help me look my best. From time to time I’d like to share what I’ve learned. No long or hard lessons

from me. I like tips I can remember and use, short and sweet. Here’s this month’s tip.

If you were like me, you’d love to have beautiful full sensuous lips. However, if you were like me you wouldn’t. So how do you fix that? Try this for fuller lips.

Outline the lips with a pencil that is the same shade as your lips. Then, on the center of the upper lip, use a brown pencil and draw a second line. Apply lip color and the brown will blend right in but your top lip will definitely look fuller.

Or try this. Apply a little Vaseline or lip gloss to the middle of the bottom lip, which brings the lips out, making them look larger.

I wanted my wife Theresa to make this trip with me as she has done many times in the past, but she decided not to go after I had told Melanie that we wanted to go. Melanie said that there was another couple that had a similar problem so as a result I went on the cruise with Hope from Arizona.

A few days before the cruise I visited my dentist because one of my molars wasn’t feeling right. X-rays were taken and showed nothing wrong. He prescribed an antibiotic in case it was a sinus infection. Theresa was very helpful in putting together my wardrobe and advising me on what to wear, etc.

A shuttle bus was scheduled to pick me up at my home on Sunday morning at 0500 hours and on Saturday night my tooth began to ache. It hurt so much that I told Theresa that I could not go like that. It was too late to get help so I remembered that I still had a bottle of painkiller tablets from a surgery. I took one and it knocked out the pain. I was ready to go in the morning!

When I boarded the Victory I was photographed and given a boarding pass. This became a source of laughter each time I boarded the ship en femme because I was wearing my Fire Department T shirt when I first came on board. I then proceeded to my stateroom where I met Hope for the first time. We gave each other a sisterly hug then went on to breakfast. We got along together very well for the entire trip.

That evening Hope and I proceeded to the dining room where we found our assigned seats. To my surprise Hope and I were seated directly across from Dr. Jane Ellen and his wife Mary. During the

seven evening meals we had the most pleasant conversations about most everything. Jane even wanted to know about what battles my great grandfather was in during the War Between the States or Civil War. We talked about our children and my grandchildren. He told about the dangers of using hormones and the number of suicides among those who have transitioned. In any case, Hope and I enjoyed the company of Dr. Jane Ellen and Mary. Jane Ellen told me that she liked having me there and that she enjoyed my stories and to keep on writing them.

I made three bus tours with Hope on the Islands of Puerto Rico, St. Martin and St. Thomas. On St. Martin I talked to a lady sitting next to me who thought that I was a genetic female. When I mentioned my wife she looked at me and was upset at what I had said. On the bus tour on St. Thomas I was more careful and when the lady sitting next to me heard about my three grandchildren she said that I was a very good grandmother. I didn’t know what to say, as I had never considered myself as a grandmother before. Hope was in the same bus talking to somebody else. Near the end of this bus tour we had a shopping and rest stop. We ran into Jane Ellen and Mary where we enjoyed a cool drink at a sidewalk café. They and Hope had soft drinks, but I had two mugs of beer. In a store on St. Thomas I bought a tiny silver coin that was supposed to have been from the Spanish ship, "Concepcion" that sunk after hitting a reef in 1641. This was for my darling wife. When I boarded the ship after each tour and I placed my boarding pass into the machine the Guard would say with a big smile, "Roberta" because the picture of me was as a male and I was en femme. There was a talent show on the ship and one of the best performers was Jill who did a Marilyn Monroe impersonation and was excellent. Later at Peggy and Melanie’s cocktail party she performed another fabulous show. I have pictures of us together and she said that she would send me an autographed photo of herself.

After many hugs and good byes we parted and returned to our respective homes. My tooth was really getting painful on the way home, but to add to my discomfort, the driver of the shuttle bus decided to drop off a passenger at an army base. We drove into a heavily guarded gate where our bus was examined underneath the engine cover and in the trunk. I had to produce an ID and have my luggage searched. The GI that wanted to be dropped off at his door should have realized this would happen as well as the driver. In any event, I finally got home. My tooth was killing me with pain and the next day I had a root canal done.

This was my first Dignity Cruise and I had such a great time that I hope to be able to attend another next year with my wife.

Well, maybe entirely secret. Several of us have had a lively email correspondence and some of us have even shared time together. Most of us have never met, though, because my spouse does not know of me and could not accept me, if she knew. So, you might be surprised to learn that this little note is to thank you all for what you each of have meant to me.

I was raised in a fundamentalist religion, which held that the very idea of experimenting with my femininity was an unthinkable transgression of God and nature’s obvious intention for me, made manifest in my anatomy. That "offense" and its related distress over my feminine impulses led to a lifetime of sometimes suicidal despair, including more than a decade of often intense, but always futile, psychotherapy designed to "cure" my "disorder."

Nonetheless, I reached a time when I felt confident that I had resolved that life long identity crisis. I was a middle aged man, finally resolved to being just that. It was then that I met and married the sweetest, most generous, most loving and beautiful woman I have ever known. She is a woman, however, who so values her conception of my manhood that it would destroy our marriage were she to learn of my inner self, which, it ultimately turned out, never actually went away.

I am now retired, while my wife is reaching the top of her business career. The time I have alone has helped me finally come to terms with who I am. CES has been a profound catalyst in that process.

I now know that I share with some of you the conviction that I am overwhelmingly and unalterably feminine at the core. For whatever reason, by the time I was three I wanted to be a little girl. And though I developed a tough and thoroughly successful male persona to hide who I am– even from myself – that little girl has never disappeared. My "disorder" was real. But the disorder was the profound mismatch between my anatomy and my gender. I now know that those feminine impulses assailing me all my life were not a virus trying to get in. They were my soul trying to get out. I could no more be "cured" of them than be "cured" of myself.

How has CES helped? Well, first, there is the Web site and its publication of the newsletter. I think I learned more, more quickly about exploring my femininity from the CES web site than any comparable source I have ever encountered.

Even more important have been those of you who welcomed me and with whom I have developed close relationships after the email announcement of my membership. Among those active in CES, I must especially and forever thank Terri, who opened the CES door to me and whose gentle concern and encouragement I continue to feel. And through Terri, I met Rachel, whose selfless work on the newsletter is exceeded in value to us only by the research on our condition she calls to our attention and the real life experiences she shares, inspiring us to overcome our own inhibitions.

With some of you – one former member in particular – I have explored joy and heartbreak, fashion and make up, and who we really are and why. We have questioned whether we have some kind of special gift, which we should simply accept, learn from, and enjoy, while living out our anatomical destiny, or whether we may be so

fundamentally and uncompromisingly feminine in gender and outlook that living as males will be forever frustrating and incomplete.

Through CES I have learned that who each of us is probably depends on influences are totally beyond our control and which no one yet seems fully able to explain. Some of us are simply more comfortable dressed as women and have no wish ever to go further. Some dress only occasionally and others do it as often as they can. A few, like me, have come to embrace their core as so overwhelmingly feminine that they would conform their bodies to it, were it not for marital, family, or economic circumstances. I have learned that the answer for each of us is unique and depends on the facts unique to our own lives.

I cannot now know how the rest of my life may unfold. But I do know that I have reached the first clarity I have ever had regarding my femininity. That clarity has brought me a degree of inner peace I have never known before. Embracing my feminine soul has made me a gentler, more generous, and more loving person.

Not every insight has come from CES. But So whether we ever actually meet or I remain forever only a secret sister, thank you for all you have meant to me. And, if any of you ever wonder whether that trip all the way to Baltimore each month is really worth it, remember what your keeping the CES flame alive means for us who cannot go. You offer us a love, help, encouragement and support that is surely worthy of the name "sister."

ByRosemary

My wife and I wear lingerie of different sizes. We both wear similar styled panties, but of a slightly different size, so they are easy to get mixed up in the laundry. I fill an "A" cup bra or a "B" cup with silicone padding while my wife wears a larger size cup. She needs no extra padding. So it’s easier to keep the bras straight.

Sometimes my fire company pager goes off in the night and I must dress in a hurry. Not wanting to disturb my wife while she is sleeping, I grab a pair of panties out of my drawer or from the laundry basket if they haven’t been sorted out. There is nothing more disconcerting than to be at an accident or fire scene and find that my panties are too large and are sliding down my legs underneath my blue jeans.

We have discussed how we could prevent this from happening so we thought that I could wear one set of colors and my wife could wear another. That way we could sort them out and place them into the correct drawers. In order to accomplish this we would have to start over again with new panties unless we have some of the correct color.

Bras are not a problem because the difference in size is very obvious. I only use slips when I am wearing a fancy dress. I wear blue jeans, panties and bras most of the time. The only time that I have had a problem with a bra, is when I am wearing a T-shirt and the strap slips off of my shoulder or when the bra shows through the T-shirt.

Stopped the students in Dr. Thomas’ class on human sexuality from coming to class on the 6^th of March, nor did those conditions stop Mary Alice, Terri, Becky, Chrissie and Pattie from attending either.

The nine women who attended the session were most welcoming and attentive, especially since earlier snow days had prevent Dr. Thomas from going fully into the transgender concept. Therefore the participants, when told by their instructor that the next session would include a panel of crossdressers, fully expected Ru Paul wannabe’s or ex-Jerry Springer rejects on stage. And this is by their own admission…none of them were knowingly aware of a crossdresser other than what they had seen on television. One stated she had expected to see either men in dresses or feathery boas over stiletto heels and short skirts She would have assumed we were indeed women—either professionally dressed on our lunch hour from the office or in classic casual attire responding to female shopping gene.

The questions ranged from the expected—such as spousal responses or how did one pick her femme name—to the unexpected—such as use of a gaff. There were some candid admissions—such as from the woman who admitted she hated to shave and wanted to know how we handled the situation and our feelings. We, of course, pulled no punches and willingly accepted any and all questions, personal and otherwise. As we told the class, there weren’t any questions that could embarrass a man who was already standing there in front of them dressed in hose and heels, panties and bra with breast forms, and in a dress with a wig and makeup.

All of the students agreed after the class that we achieved our goal as members of CES and Tri-Ess in terms of educating the public and reaching out to those whose only awareness of the transgender community was the more flamboyant and outspoken segment of the spectrum. While they themselves were not sure at this stage what their response would be if their spouse or significant other "came out" as a crossdresser, they were convinced that our presentation had made them more aware and more understanding of the transgendered nature in their midst.

Chi Epsilon Sigma has a lending library of books, videos, and cassette tapes for our members. Here is a list of our current holdings, and how you can access the library.

2) Contact me, Becky (beckyxd@hotmail.com or snail-mail at CES, % Becky Adams, PO Box 505, Brooklandville, MD 21022, for your selection.