by Amy Bloom
On the other side of me is a man in his late sixties, recently retired as a senior partner in a white-shoe law firm in the Deep South. He looks great. He looks like a Neiman Marcus matron, right down to his Chanel slingbacks, and although he seems a bit out of place, it is only because the cruise is so downscale and there are twenty-year-old guys clumping around the casino in their NASCAR jackets, baseball caps, and hiking boots, as if a nice shirt and a pair of slacks would be way too much trouble.
At first I thought that the matronly look so common to straight crossdressers reflected some weird attachment to the mother, that the image they wished to present was that of their own first woman—hence the heavy foundation, the blue eyeshadow, the big pearl button earrings. I no longer think so. That same look is common among their wives, and among lots of middle-aged women not much interested in changing fashions.
Most crossdressers, and almost all married crossdressers, live lives in which they are not crossdressed. They don’t take female hormones, they usually don’t have electrolysis even if they would like to (many express the wish to wake up and find themselves without facial, arm, or leg hair, but their wives are opposed), and they are not regular readers of Elle, Vogue, or even Ladies’ Home Journal. They cannot easily put together a natural, believable female appearance. First, you need beard camouflage to flatten and disguise the stubble, then powder over that and foundation over that, and sweating is a big problem. (Jim Bridges, a transformation guide and guru, creator of the Bridges to Beauty 2000 and Hollywood Makeup Secrets videos, which are offered at his boutique in California and through his booming Internet business—“Can’t tell you who in the House of Representatives, can’t tell you who in the NFL,” he says to me while putting false eyelashes on a John Deere salesman at Fall Harvest—counsels a quick swipe of antiperspirant on the upper lip and at the hairline. Crossdressing is not only anxiety-provoking and arousing, it is also warm under the wig, the corset, the padding, the pantyhose.) You need the foundation for smoothness and for color, and by the time you add lipstick and a wig, if you’re a man you get that overdone crossdresser look, and if you’re a woman you get Joan Collins. A pronounced face requires pronounced makeup for balance, and after the false eyelashes and even the most subtle contouring of the wider jaw, the thick brow, one can look beautiful or ridiculous, but one cannot look like most of the women around.
My tablemates look like more attractive versions of the photos I’ve seen in the personals sections at the back of crossdresser magazines. I flipped through thirty issues of Transgender Tapestry and saw a lot of men who looked bad, like every joke and caricature of a crossdresser: the big shoulders, the jagged makeup, the prom dresses or JCPenney crushed-velvet tube dresses. Some looked mentally ill and possibly dangerous. I saw a few beautiful women, very often transsexual, as it turned out, but occasionally just crossdressers blessed with the right shape and the conventional proportions, narrow shoulders, small hands. And then there were always a dozen crossdressers who looked like pleasant, average women: librarians, daycare providers, schoolteachers, not staggering, not intense, not lovely, but perfectly ordinary, pantsuited, sensibly shod middle-aged women. I have met crossdressers whose presentation is just this side of Christina Aguilera, and I have met a fifty-year-old Midwestern engineer and a sixty-year-old born-again Christian CEO and a forty-year-old police captain, all of whom dress exactly as they would if they had been born to the distaff side, in clothes both contemporary and appropriate, whether Gap or Escada or Dress Barn. Anatomy may not be destiny, but it certainly lays a hand on our options.
Age is a great help to crossdressers. It is, for us all, the great androgynizer; the skin softens and sags, the secondary sex characteristics shrink and fade, slacken and thin. I have seen far more convincing crossdressers over sixty than under. Except for the guys whose height and build make it impossible for the world to construe them as female (and this is a problem for very tall and muscular women, as well), by sixty, crossdressing men have undergone the inevitable softening of the face and chest, the diminution of testosterone, and have enough practice and enough confidence to make very passable grandmothers of themselves. Not surprisingly, the amount of time that many crossdressers spend en femme triples after they retire. They can crossdress when they want, and many of them want to a lot.
There are twenty-five crossdressers among the four hundred or so male passengers aboard the Holiday, and this may represent roughly their proportion of the general population, but it’s impossible to say for sure. No one seems to have any reliable statistics about how many heterosexual crossdressers there are. I check with the International Foundation for Gender Education in Waltham, Massachusetts, which acts as switchboard, referral service, news agency, and educational center for both crossdressers and transsexuals, and with GenderPAC (Gender Public Advocacy Coalition), and with Dallas Denny of AEGIS (American Educational Gender Information Service), a longtime activist in the transsexual community, but none of them can tell me. “Too many guys in the closet,” a voice at the IFGE says. “How could anyone presume to count?”
I call Ray Blanchard, a self-described “traditional clinician,” who is head of clinical sexology services at Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and has been studying sexuality for thirty years. “No one knows,” he says. “I consulted several colleagues, and the consensus is that there’s no useful epidemiological information. Period.”
I check with Jane Ellen and Mary Frances Fairfax of Tri-Ess, the Society for the Second Self, “a family-oriented support group for heterosexual crossdressers.” The Fairfaxes (this is the last name they use for their crossdressing life, their mutual invented femme name) live in Texas, where Jane Ellen is otherwise Chet, and a physician, and a fierce cribbage player and the father of three boys, two in college, one in prep school. They offer that at last count there were eleven hundred crossdressers and three hundred twenty wives in Tri-Ess’s thirty chapters nationwide, but they don’t know how many heterosexual crossdressers there are either.
“Maybe three or four million,” Jane Ellen hazards. “Maybe somewhere between three and five percent of the population. People who claim it’s more, I think that’s just, you know, a minority wanting to be bigger than it is. And people who say more like one or two percent, I think those are the ones who are ashamed.” When I ask Ray Blanchard for an estimate, he says he thinks three to five percent of the population is about right too.
These are just about the only two points of agreement between Blanchard and the Fairfaxes: no one knows how many heterosexual crossdressers there are, and all these men in dresses who assert that they are straight, sometimes to the point of annoying everyone else, are straight. They may not be straight in exactly the way that noncrossdressing men are—most heterosexual men don’t look at an attractive woman and think, I’d like to have sex with her, I’d like to wear her dress, I’d like men and women to look at me as they look at her—but they are straight.
It was precisely for these men that Tri-Ess was founded in 1976, as a melding of several crossdressing groups, including the historic Hose and Heels Club, which began meeting in California in 1961, and is to many crossdressers what Stonewall is to gay men: the beginning of the end of shame (although not, for the crossdressers, the end of fiercely preserved anonymity). Tri-Ess is now the largest organization for heterosexual crossdressers and their spouses, by which they mean wives, and although nobody would object if a female-to-male crossdresser and her husband wanted to join, it is true that they have not yet, and it is true that neither the folks at Tri-Ess nor I can quite imagine the dynamics of that couple, since the spousal, role requires an abundance of traditional wifely virtues: accommodation, compromise, and gracious acceptance of that which is unwelcome, and often truly painful. The “spouses and partners” who are mentioned so frequently in Tri-Ess literature and who attend the SPICE workshop, which Tri-Ess sponsors, are women.
The Fairfaxes, a little John Gray, a little country doctor in their beaming certai
nty and parental concern for the weaknesses of others, are the driving forces behind Tri-Ess. For some crossdressers, Tri-Ess is a beacon of hope in a society that judges them weirdos and queers when they know they are not. For critics within the crossdressing community, the Fairfaxes are good people, but misguided about the nature of crossdressing, even self-deceiving. Lots of crossdressers take issue with the Tri-Ess focus on “family values” and heterosexuality. The Tennessee Vals, for instance, will welcome you “if you consider yourself a crossdresser, transsexual or any other type of gender bender … whether gay or straight, bisexual or asexual.” There is a big-tent movement among crossdressers these days, and many groups don’t share Tri-Ess’s exclusionary philosophy.
Jane Ellen Fairfax is a man with a mission: to save crossdressers from their worst selves and to save their marriages. Mary Frances, firm but unassuming, competent, and mild except when offended, is his partner in this, and has been the secretary of Tri-Ess’s board of directors (of which Jane Ellen is the chair) since 1988.
Jane Ellen has a hearty, blunt demeanor that is sugared over in the Southern manner when he’s crossdressed, more emphatic when he’s “en drab,” as they say, but he is always smart, always tenacious and unshakable in his self-esteem and in his beliefs, which include churchgoing Christianity and the platform of the Republican Party. He sees crossdressing as more than a hobby and something quite different from a problem. He insists that the wearing of women’s clothes is both relaxing and expressive of a feminine self that is nurturing and gentle, and that can enhance any marriage if the wife is wise enough to appreciate it and strong enough to corral what can be, as Jane Ellen admits, a narcissistic, self-indulgent habit.
Once a wife or partner realizes her mate isn’t leaving her for another man or for a new life as a woman, or taking risks that could destroy their financial and family life, the two of them can seek a balanced solution.… Many of the traits that attracted her in the first place—sensitivity, kindness, appreciation of beauty, etc.—can now be seen as belonging to that “woman within.”
[Tri-Ess pamphlet, “Do You Know Someone Who Is a Cross Dresser?” February 2000]
A central tenet of Tri-Ess is that crossdressing is a gift.
Crossdressers are blessed with an additional facet to our personalities. As we accept our dual, masculine-and-feminine, “bi-gendered” gift, and seek to understand and explore it, the result is a very fulfilling broadening of our entire personality.… Our occasional adoption of a complete feminine persona and total gender role presentation is an outward personal expression of our inner feminine feelings. We dress appropriately in emulation, rather than in mockery, of femininity.… We cultivate our complete feminine image, with lingerie, makeup, wig, padding for breasts and hips, as well as feminine clothing, shoes and accessories and even a femme name.
[Tri-Ess pamphlet, “Tri-Ess Today,” 2000]
The Fairfaxes hope to persuade the world outside Tri-Ess that heterosexual crossdressers are just normal folks, not at all like those gender outlaws and gender-benders—bearded men in dresses, “chicks with dicks”—whom Jane Ellen calls “gender mockers.” The Fairfaxes want crossdressers out of the closet, not because Tri-Ess wishes to defy or upend society, but because they believe that if society understood how normal crossdressing is, there would be no resistance to it; it would be seen as no stranger a form of relaxation than golf. The words that Ray Blanchard uses when he talks about crossdressing—“fetish,” “continuum of gender dysphoria,” “erotic self-absorption”—are words the Fairfaxes don’t ever want to hear. It upsets them to have crossdressing viewed as being about sex, which they try to get as far away from as possible, or as odd, although they know it is, because they also know that they are exactly the kind of people—Christians, family people, Texans—that George W. Bush wants and needs. When you say “crossdresser,” Jane Ellen and Mary Frances want you to think only of a guy relaxing in a dress.
“Of course it’s not relaxing,” Blanchard says, with some heat. “Heels and makeup and a wig and a corset? It’s preposterous. Even women don’t find that relaxing. Relaxing is a pair of sweatpants, clothing that doesn’t even feel like clothing. Crossdressers want to normalize this, to have it seen as relaxation and self-expression. I’ve had people say to me, ‘You know, I bet if there wasn’t all this stereotyping, these people would not choose to wear a dress.’ I say that’s nonsense. The crossdressing is an attempt to resolve an internal conflict, and it’s not about fabric. If we had clothing that was identical in every way, including fabric and shape, except men wore shirts with four buttons and women had shirts with five, crossdressers would want more than anything to have the shirt with five. We don’t know why.”
Our categories and our descriptions are so narrow and self-protective that not only don’t we have words for the drive to crossdress, we don’t have any language to describe the mixture of attraction and envy that often leads these men to have sex with women while thinking of themselves as male lesbians, “men trapped in men’s bodies,” in Dr. Anne Lawrence’s words. For crossdressers, Ray Blanchard says, “it’s like they plug in the lamp and the toaster pops up. They emulate the women they want to have—some kind of confusion between attraction to a sexual object and being the object. Many see an attractive woman, get aroused and then envious. They cannot get their wires uncrossed.”
A brochure from the Fantasia Fair of 1986 encapsulates the crossdressers’ bind.
What is a Crossdresser?
An individual, usually heterosexual, who desires and needs to dress in the clothing of the opposite sex at different times throughout his or her life. This compulsive behavior generally starts at a young age and the individual struggles alone for many years with this closeted need. Cross-Dressing is not a sickness, but represents a person who enjoys expressing another aspect of his personality and gains both emotional and physical pleasure from this transition. It is not a hobby, but a necessity and Cross-dressing is for life.
This seems to me to be the heart of the crossdressers’ dilemma, and now the heart of mine in writing about them. Crossdressing is a compulsion, but somehow not a sickness. A good wife should tolerate it because the man has no choice, but it shouldn’t be too hard to tolerate because it is, after all, a gift. It is about enjoyment, it gives physical and emotional pleasure—and it’s a necessity. The necessity of crossdressing is frightening to the men and to their wives, and their wish to tame it, to dress it up as a preference and a superior personality, is understandable.
“We learn what everyone learns,” Jane Ellen Fairfax says. “Girls are now taught you can be anything you want to be. No one tells a little boy, ‘You can be a sweet, soft, and wonderful little boy and an astronaut.’ Men are still being trained—well, you know, as Virginia Prince [founder of Tri-Ess and one of the godmothers of crossdressing] says, ‘Men are always trying to become what women are content to be.’ ”
“What is it that women are content to be?” I ask.
“Oh, you know, they know when to give it a rest. They know when and how to quit. They can relax and be themselves.”
I do know. He means that in his vision, idealized and old-fashioned, women are like oceans, or like fields, or like horses, and men are sailors, farmers, and cowboys, and that is their curse and that is women’s blessing, although women may not realize it. It is exhausting to be a man, and delightful to kick off those demands and slip into something more comfortable. It no longer seems odd to me, when I am talking to the Fairfaxes, that they are middle-of-the-road Republicans; it seems odd only that this quirk, this habit of wearing women’s clothing, would make anyone think that they belonged at the same party as Queer Nation, Dykes on Bikes, and transsexual women who become lesbian feminists.
Jane Ellen says, “Crossdressers are not women, and they’re not trying to be women.” When he talks about crossdressers, he almost always says “they.” When he talks about his marriage, his practice, and his politics, he says “I.”
“A lot of m
en want to go there, to be our feminine selves, to slow down and stop striving.”
“It sounds like yoga,” I say.
Jane Ellen is silent. It sounds like yoga except for the two hours of preparation time. It sounds like yoga except that it begins in a man’s life as an erotic response and becomes an erotic fetish. Sometimes I put on lipstick when I’m tense. It makes me feel armored, less vulnerable to the world. That’s not the same thing. I don’t feel that the lipstick is essential to my being, that without it I must stay home, and even as I know that there is an erotic dimension to getting dressed up (it’s not just crossdressers who appreciate the rustle of a slip, the slide of a stocking), when the dressing and the garments are the fuel and the expression of one’s sexual wishes, it is about sex, and not gender. For all their talk of relaxation, the Fairfaxes are too smart to think, or to try to persuade me, that crossdressing is ordinary, or that it’s just a hobby. Fly-fishing is a hobby; spending two hours preparing yourself to walk through a mall or a hotel lobby, hoping—hoping to the point of anxiety and arousal—that you will be perceived as female, is not what anyone, not least the crossdressers themselves, thinks of as a hobby.
“Crossdressers’ desires do not map onto anything in our world,” Ray Blanchard says. “You will never know how they feel if you are not one of them. And they have to disconnect between reality and their fantasy. Otherwise, it’s too disruptive. It’s too disruptive to acknowledge that you wish your penis was part of your wife’s body and not yours. It’s too disruptive to acknowledge that this is a sexual compulsion—one that diminishes over time, to the point that you can begin to tame it and not be so driven by the sex part, but there are very few former crossdressers. Even when the sexual spark, the libido fades, the attachment and the need persist. Like in marriage.”
