Crossdress

 The Psychology of Cross-Dressing

Cross-dressing (and here we refer particularly to men dressing up as women) could hardly have a worse reputation. The concept of a man taking pleasure in putting on a pair of stockings seems laughable, pitiful – and plain sinister. We assume a marriage would almost certainly break up the day a wife found her husband in her underwear; and that a manager would lose all authority if his colleagues knew about his enthusiasm for mascara and lipstick. Cross-dressing seems like an admission of failure. Instead of living up to an ideal of strength, ruggedness and sheer ‘normality’, a man keen to slip on a dress is taken to be a deviant of a particularly alarming sort.

But in truth, cross-dressing is grounded in a highly logical and universal desire: the wish to be, for a time, the gender one admires, is excited by – and perhaps loves. Dressing like a woman is merely a dramatic, yet essentially reasonable,  – and yet has been (somewhat arbitrarily) barred from. We know cross-dressing well enough in other areas of life and there think nothing of it. A five-year-old boy living in a suburb of Copenhagen who develops an interest in the lifestyle and attitudes of the cow herders of the Arizona plains would be heartily encouraged to dress up in a hat, jeans and waistcoat and aim his pistol at an imaginary Indian chief – so as to assuage his desire to get a little closer to the subject of his fascination.