Excerpts… from My Husband Betty
Chapter One - Introduction
A sexy young wife misses her husband so much she opens the closet and puts on one of his shirts. Turning the collar toward her cheek, she inhales his smell deeply. Her tan legs contrast nicely with the stiff white shirt, and her long hair falls over its starched collar. She gingerly steps toward the full-length mirror, sensually burying her toes in a white rug and holding yet another of his shirts, this one still on a hanger. She smiles. She spins. She collapses on the bed wearing one shirt and clutching the other, and the camera slyly gives us a glimpse of her upper thigh.
It could be an ad for sheets, cotton, or cologne. It could be the beginning of a porn film. In any case, it does not seem sexually-deviant. We decide that the woman is missing her husband or boyfriend – wherever he is – and never consider the fact that she might be enjoying the clothes for the power they imply. It never crosses our minds that she could be single and trying these clothes on secretly just for a thrill. We give the whole scenario meaning even when we are given nothing more than the images.
Now picture: a sexy young husband misses his wife so much he opens the closet and puts on one of her silk dressing gowns. He turns the lace collar to his cheek and inhales her smell deeply. Taking a translucent slip out of her drawer he walks to the full-length mirror, where he presses it against himself, looks into the mirror wistfully and collapses on the bed – wearing one negligee and clutching the other. The camera slyly gives us a glimpse of his upper thigh.
It would never happen. No advertising company would ever use it. The only chance we’d have of seeing such an image is if it were played for laughs, a skit on Saturday Night Live featuring the late Chris Farley. It certainly wouldn’t be sexy.
Why is the woman in a man’s shirt never a joke? Because she is sexy. We agree as a culture that women are sexy, and that they love men. It’s okay for a woman to roll around in her husband’s clothes because we understand she does so only because she misses him, loves him.
Even if the man in the ad were a handsome young man, a million objections instantly spring to mind. We would assume he was gay. We would assume he was a pervert.
Chapter Two - Crossdressed Lives
My best guess is that crossdressing is a reflection of men’s needs to experience the whole of themselves, and especially that side of themselves that is denied in a male-dominated society. Men cannot slum by ‘being women’ without the culture having a problem with it, because men are supposed to enjoy the privilege that comes from being on the top of the pile. They are certainly not supposed to reject it. We are all, as a culture, committed to believing that men are in control, because we live in a patriarchal society. We raise them to be the leaders and offer them no other option.
The complications arise because men understand their own ‘femininity’ as men, and they know women through their own men’s eyes. That may be why some crossdressers portray such a sexualized image of women when they dress as them. It may be why their notions of femininity seem a little absurd and outdated. Men objectify women – meaning, they see them as objects, not people, and what else can we expect when a man tries to replicate something he doesn’t understand in the first place?
But the crossdresser, at least, is trying. He may try to emulate women in a particularly thick-headed, masculine way, but he does it out of his love for women – even if that love can only be shown by the short spectrum of emotions men in our society are allowed to express.
Chapter Three - Crossdressers’ Wives, Girlfriends, and Partners
Most women want to love their husbands. Most women are socialized to love men and make room for their quirks. Doing so when you’re married to a crossdresser often means you are challenging yourself beyond your normal limits of love and tolerance, and every time you push your own envelope, a backlash results. I was fine with my husband being a crossdresser until I realized he wanted to “pass” in regular, public places, and then I flipped out. Meredith can stand having a crossdressing husband as long as she isn’t asked to participate. Gidget doesn’t mind her husband’s crossdressing but wish he’d cut his long hair as she feels it ‘gives him away.’ Others can stand it as long as their husbands refrain from plucking their eyebrows or shaving their legs; others if they’re not asked to take their “wife” to bed. Still others can stand it all as long as there’s no flirtation with men. Plenty of wives tell me they could even enjoy it if their husbands’ espousal of wanting to “feel like a woman” included cleaning the kitchen once in a while, and others just want their husbands to stay out of the kitchen and leave their own traditional female roles intact.
All of the women I have spoken to have different limits, but the one thing that is true of nearly all of them is that they are willing to rise to the challenge because of their love for their husbands, and the value they place on their marriages. Most crossdressers – and most men in general – take a woman’s selflessness for granted. Many do not realize how naturally women put their own needs aside for the sake of their husband or family. Pick up one self-help book for women or watch an episode of Oprah: women often have a hard time even identifying their own needs, much less insisting on having them met.
Chapter Four - Relationships
A crossdresser’s wife may opt for insisting that her husband can’t shave his legs or pierce his ears. She may benefit more from expecting and encouraging him to communicate his own needs and listen to hers. That doesn’t mean they can’t set mutual ‘boundaries’ if that works for them, but a lot of women are very uncomfortable laying down rules: it feels too much like parenting instead of partnership. Crossdressers themselves are often so appreciative that the women in their lives tolerate their dressing that they follow the rules. A rather sexist and unbalanced arrangement is the result: the man wants to crossdress but his wife will tell him how, when, and where he can, which leaves him free to blame her if he doesn’t get to dress as frequently as he’d like. To me this is not a healthy or preferable outcome for either partner.
Women already tend to compensate for the fact that many men aren’t good at communicating their feelings, are uncomfortable showing affection, and often come up short on selflessness and nurturing. Must we also be responsible for their crossdressing and control where, when and how much they do it? And take on the responsibility for the resulting guilt and shame? As far as I can tell, my husband is a grown man, and if he’s doing something that makes our relationship uncomfortable, I expect him to notice and fix it. Our responsibility, as women, is not to disrespect our partners’ need to dress. Respect is our only responsibility, and it’s quite enough to figure out how to achieve that. We’ve got to work on our own issues of self-esteem and body image and sexuality, and our plates are too full to ‘police’ their behavior as well. Maybe it’s because we’re so busy resolving their issues for them that we never get to our own.
Chapter Five - Slippery Slope
One night I was up late doing research online when I found a Frequently Asked Questions list about crossdressing by a crossdresser named “Diane.” I read it, and I was impressed. The FAQ was from 1997. I found Part II of the same FAQ from a year later and read that. A third part was posted the next year. I began to wonder what happened after 1999, and tried to find Diane’s homepage in order to locate an index.
While Diane’s homepage was loading, I switched to another window and found a different crossdresser’s FAQ and started reading the questions: 1) what is crossdressing?, 2) why do people crossdress?, 3) isn’t crossdressing a sexual perversion? I stopped to read the answer. No, crossdressing isn’t a sexual perversion, the crossdresser argues, it’s about gender. There’s that old half-truth. I proceeded to question 4): isn’t crossdressing just a step to sexual reassignment? In this case the answer was not just No, but a RESOUNDING NO. I skimmed the long paragraph and saw words like “gender” and “transsexuals” and “surgical alterations” and “trapped in the wrong body,” in quotes. I made a mental note to read the full answer carefully, but in the meantime went back to see if Diane’s homepage had finished loading. It had. The first thing I saw as a photo of Diane herself, in a wedding dress, getting married to a man in 2002.
I didn’t have to read the other crossdresser’s answer to question #4. I knew, from looking at Diane on her wedding day, fully female, that the correct answer is: sometimes. Anyone who says otherwise is full of it. Charles Anders, in The Lazy Crossdresser, relays a “common joke” in the transsexual community: “What’s the difference between a cross-dresser and a transsexual?” The answer? “Two years.” He points out that the punch line can be variable. Sometimes it’s “one year.”
For the wife of a crossdresser this is terrifying news.
Chapter Six - Sex and Sensibility
Let me be clear about the fact that not all crossdressers have sexual problems. Some crossdress and have perfectly good sex lives with their wives or girlfriends. Others are practically asexual, auto-erotic, or oversexed. Some, like Jayne, don’t understand fictionmania stories because they don’t see that their being crossdressers means that ‘anything goes’ with them sexually. Others are masochists, or fetishists, and others just like the sight of a beautiful naked woman. The variety is endless. Just as I have pointed out that some men are good partners and some are not so good, and that crossdressers can be either, so it is with crossdressers’ sexualities. Their individual sexual lives may have more to do with upbringing than with crossdressing per se. Others may have developed sexual problems as a result of hiding their crossdressing from loved ones. It is very difficult to sort out one problem from another, but the very fact that there are crossdressers who have perfectly vanilla sex lives that have nothing whatsoever to do with their crossdressing indicates that it is possible for a crossdresser to have a satisfying sex life with a partner. How the ones who have sexual problems might become satisfied in their sexual relationships takes time, openness, and maybe a little creativity.
Chapter Seven - EpiScene
But the majority of crossdressers prefer women. The only problem is, women don’t often prefer crossdressers. And even those women who wind up married to crossdressers usually forego public outings, which means my husband and I are often the first heterosexual couple composed of a genetic female and her crossdressing boyfriend that other people have met. They’ve never heard of such a thing. If they can accept the idea that the guy in the dress is straight, then they still have to jump the hurdle of trying to understand why on earth I’d want to be with a guy who is “less than a man.” And that’s often too much to ask of a person who’s had a few drinks. Snow, a woman in her early 20s who I interviewed for this book, says it’s easier for people to accept the fact that she’s polyamorous than it is for them to understand that both of her boyfriends are t-girls: the concept is too new, even for the younger generation.
Of course, other people just get it, like the lesbian woman who asked us how we have sex. She loved the idea. “They both get to play both parts,” she explained to a friend who’d joined us. “I’d love that - I wouldn’t have to lead every time.”
A night out for us is often an ‘outreach’ opportunity, and the other wives and crossdressers who have been out as couples know exactly what I mean. We are the first of our kind people have met, and we end up informing others of the existence of straight crossdressers. We end up answering more and more personal questions as the night goes on. Crossdressers aren’t expected to be out. They’re supposed to be at home, in the closet, whether their wives know or not. No one expects crossdressers to be out at bars having drinks with their wives - that would be obscene. Sometimes other people’s assumptions make me feel like the Loch Ness monster: something between a myth and a joke.
Chapter Eight - Politics
If one more crossdresser complains to me about how unfair it is that they can’t wear what they want and tells me I don’t understand because I can wear whatever I want, my head might explode. First off, women cannot wear whatever they want. If a woman dresses too provocatively she’s assumed to be a whore; if she’s not sexy or feminine enough she’s a man-hating lesbian. Ditto if she won’t wear high heels. She may get picked on if she wears revealing clothes without being ‘model skinny,’ or she may get gently chastised for not dressing ‘more attractively’ if she prefers practical, comfortable clothes. It is true that I don’t get ridiculed for wearing jeans in public the way a man would for wearing a skirt. But what the crossdresser doesn’t recognize is that he’s not yearning for the right to wear certain items of clothing: what he wants is the right to be his transgendered self in public.
After five years of talking to crossdressers online and in person, I’ve developed a standard response to a CD who bemoans his lack of sartorial freedom. When he wonders aloud why he can’t wear what he’d like to, I just say, “because you haven’t earned it yet.” I’ve made more than one crossdresser angry with that statement, and some just do not want to face the truth of the situation. The problem is, the crossdressing community has virtually cut itself off from all the groups who could otherwise educate and liberate them: the feminist community, the Gay and Lesbian communities, the alternative sex community, and the Transsexual community. There are many people whose experiences and histories could inform the crossdresser’s, but a variety of circumstances have prevented that exchange. Crossdressers have isolated themselves from these groups in different ways, but the result is a minority of straight men who don’t understand that the only way anyone gets their rights is by fighting for them.