My thoughts on why I and perhaps others cross-dress

You have a life of success and accomplishment coupled with health issues. Cross dressing seems to relieve many of your symptoms and issues. I find dressing makes me feel good. It reduces stress, maybe allows me to escape who I am and what I deal with in the real world and I just really like it.

I never thought it through to such great detail and reasoning. I liked a particular clothing item and wore it often. I added other clothing items over the years until I became a full fledged cross dresser.

In my opinion, I'm not harming myself or others.  It's fun, therapeutic, relaxing and just makes me feel good. That's why I do it. Forget the guilt and over rationalization. If dressing up makes you feel good for what ever reason just do it.

Hi Louise welcome with us
Catherine

2016_introductions new members: Louise James original post: 

I will call myself here Louise James.  I am 67 years old.  I am a retired general surgeon.  I was declared totally disabled in 2009.  I closed my surgical practice in 1995 due to exhaustion and sleep deprivation due to overwork and worsening sleep apnea.  I had almost recovered when in 1996 I had a mid-brain bleed that was complicated by acute hydrocephalus (cerebrospinal fluid started accumulating inside my brain because a clot blocked the outflow of the fluid from what is called the fourth ventricle) that required the emergency placement of a ventriculo-peritoneal shunt.  My now ex-wife saved my life by taking me to our local hospital emergency room.  The neurosurgeon who operated on me told her that there was only a 50:50 chance that I would get off the table alive and that if I did, there was a very high chance that I would be severely disabled.

Looking at me now, you couldn’t tell that I had ever had a cerebrovascular accident (CVA).  The bleed, however, did  damage my brain’s arousal center (called the reticular activating system), so I am drowsy all the time.  I also damaged my frontal lobes a little, enough to have small chronic subdural hematoma’s over both of them.  The main effect of that has been that my executive functions were impaired somewhat.  I had difficulty planning, staying focused, and being on time.   I also had a hard time remembering names.   I could not return to my practice so I did many odd jobs.  I served tables, worked as a janitor, and eventually got some research and teaching jobs.  I worked for 13 years at this and that but could not keep work because of the subtle and not so subtle problems I developed after the mid-brain bleed.

I  cross-dressed briefly at age 14 but stopped after about a year or so because I thought it was too arousing.  My father caught me cross-dressed in my mother’s clothes once but was very kind to me.  He just waited for me to change back into my regular clothes and never brought it up to me again.

My family and I were and are deeply religious Christians.  I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I am active in my church.  I am a high priest with a temple recommend.  I am a member of our ward choir and teach family history indexing of vital records.  I was married for 35 years to a lovely wife.  We had four children: three boys and a girl who have been very successful.  My oldest son is a professor of art and animation.  My two younger sons are both mechanical engineers.  One is a professor of mechanical engineering who has received a Presidential Early Career Award for his innovative research.  The other is still getting his PhD.  My only daughter is a Tony Award-winning and Grammy Nominated singer.  All are married.  I have 5 grandchildren and one is on the way.

Their success, however, did not come easily.  They all had significant learning problems.  They a difficulty with inductive learning–they had a hard time making inferences from what seemed to them to be random facts or data.  They were deductive geniuses.  Once they knew facts they could deduce other facts from that information very well.  They had trouble learning new words from their context.  They had difficulty understanding the main ideas of stories or newspaper articles.  Interpreting history was hard for them.  We had them tested and found that if someone didn’t help them learn what the main ideas of what they read were, they could wind up with a 5th grade understanding in the world, might not graduate from high school, have difficulty finding and keeping jobs, and might not be able to marry or stay married.  There was even a risk that they could wind up becoming criminals due to the frustration they could experience in learning new things and understanding and following rules.   I was asked by the psychologists who had tested them to read and interpret for them all their English and Social Studies/History assignments, and do research projects with them in history and science.  We entered history and English essay contests and science fairs and worked on these projects together.  They/we won many prizes.  They got exposed to the competition they would face in the world and learned what excellent research and prize-winning write entailed.  They earned scholarships to major universities and have succeeded beyond all my expectations.

In 2003 my mother died.  A month after that, for whatever reasons, I developed incessant urges to cross-dress.  I tried to control it on my own but failed.  I finally shared the problem openly with my wife and sought counseling from my bishop.  I was referred to LDS Family Services.  I was referred to an LDS PhD psychologist who specialized in treating persons with sex addictions.  He believed that I had an OCD-like condition and treated me with Exposure Response Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and “Come-to-your-senses” therapy.  I did not respond at all.

I sought help from a highly regarded local psychiatrist.  From an analysis of my heart rate variability, she was able to find that I had sustained frontal and temporal lobe damage as well as some deep limbic system and basal ganglia damage that had resulted in ADD, OCD, a mood disorder, and mild depression and anxiety.  After trying a number of anti-anxiety and SSRI anti-depressant medications, which did not help,  I found that low dose St. John’s Wort for mild depression, Vyvanse, an amphetamine-like drug for ADD and drowsiness, and Luvox for OCD completely stopped my urges to cross-dress–for a year and a half.  I was told that I would have to stop all central nervous system stimulants except caffeine and all anti-depressants or I could develop seizures or have another stroke.

My sleep apnea worsened, and my abilities to focus, get grades in on time, and prepare lesson plans deteriorated.  I was fired and told to apply for total disability.  I was able to find part-time work doing research but found that I would fall asleep at my computer after only 15 or 20 minutes.  I found, however, that if I just put towels under my shirt to simulate breasts, I could work for 8-12 hours at a time.  I told my wife this, and she decided to divorce me.   Just the thought of my cross-dressing again gave her abdominal pain.

Also during this time, I developed the serotonin syndrome and had another stroke–a lacunar stroke that caused slurred speech and left-hand clumsiness.  Fortunately, the symptoms subsided in about a month.

I returned home from the hospital in November 2009 unable to do much of anything.  It took 20 minutes for me to decide whether to take a shower or prepare breakfast.  I wanted to sleep constantly even with fairly high doses of caffeine.  I didn’t want to cross-dress again but decided to see if it would help me.  It did.  I was able to recover enough to return to my part-time research position and could work if I cross-dressed.  The university where I worked was supportive of cross-dressers and other members of the LGBT community.

I also developed testosterone deficiency and did some research into possible causes of transsexualism and transvestism.  I learned after my mother died that she had a slow-growing uterine muscle cell tumor called a uterine stromal cell sarcoma.  It is very rare and found virtually only in women who had taked DES or diethylstilbesterol as some time in their life.  DES is an estrogen-like compound that was used to prevent premature labor in pregnant women from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s.   It was found to induce rare vaginal tumors the daughters of women who took this hormone.   In other studies, DES was found to be a hormone disruptor that could affect the sexual behavior of the males whose mothers took the medication during the time they were pregnant.  25% of the males exposed in utero to DES turned out to be gay, transsexual, or transvestite.  A few cases of ambiguous genitalia and intersex conditions were also associated with taking DES during pregnancy.

Lead and DDT I also found had been linked with abnormal sexual behavior and sometimes abnormalities of primary and secondary sexual tissue development in experimental animals and in wildlife.  I learned that when I was engendered in 1948, I lived downwind from Owen’s Lake-a dry lake in the Mojave Desert.  My father worked in China Lake, CA, only about 60 miles south of Owen’s Lake. Dust laden with lead and other heavy metals would blow into China Lake from Owen’s Lake all the time, especially in the late fall, around the time of my second trimester, just at the time my brain was developing.  DDT use was also being sprayed to control mosquitos in the Kearn’s River valley where China Lake got its water.  DDT was sprayed widely in Southern California for years until it was banned in the mid-1970s.  The persistence of both these pollutants in the environment is well known and has continued to affect wildlife for more than 30 years–and perhaps the human population as well and may account in part for the skyrocketing numbers of LGBT, particularly T part of that spectrum, we see today.

Just because DDT, leaded gasoline, and DES were banned in the mid-1970s doesn’t mean that hormone disruptor exposure has ceased.  I recently reviewed an article describing over 1500 other hormone-like compounds that are known to affect sexual structures and behavior in wildlife and/or laboratory animals.  Bisphenol A is used make plastics that are commonly used to store juices, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables.  Blood levels can be detected in virtually our entire population.  It is an estrogen-like compound that crosses the placenta.  PVC pipes and the plastic linings of metal cans gave been shown to be sources of hormone-disrupting compounds.  Flame retardants used in most upholstery are also known to be hormone disruptors.  Common herbicides and insecticides, dioxins, and many other compounds like these have been shown to be hormone disruptors and have been measured in the blood and breast milk of pregnant and nursing women.

When I was in medical school California in the early 1970s, we were required to take a sex education class that was mandated by the state of California for doctors.  We became acquainted with normal LGB sexual practices.  We did not discuss anything about transsexualism or transvestism.  I had never even heard the terms transsexual or transvestite and had never seen a  cross-dresser gay or heterosexual believe it or not–other than myself. It was not until the early 2000s that nurses and doctors started to discuss transsexualism.  Cross-dressing was occasionally discussed as a way to spice up heterosexual sex or demonized as a perversion.

Despite being an avid student of the Old and New Testament, I was not aware of the condemnation of cross-dressing found in Deuteronomy until after I developed my OCD-like cross-dressing urges in 2003.  I have since shared my need to cross-dress with several bishops and stake presidents (leaders over several local congregations) with an area president, two apostles, and Gordon B. Hinckley, one of the Presidents of my church who happened to be a neighbor of mine for a few years.

I did cross-dress publically for a while and became a founding member of my local Tri-Ess chapter.  After about two years of monthly conversations, I was told that I could cross-dress in private only to maintain my temple and priesthood privileges.  My stake president was very supportive and told my family to continue respecting me as a worthy father.  He respects, however, my now ex-wife’s decision to divorce me but applauds our practice of coming together at family gatherings and our frequent visits and dates with each other.   Neither my ex-wife or I have dated other people although I have looked for other potential partners.  The main problem they all have had, however, has been that none of them have been the amazing mother of my children that my ex-wife has been nor are they the grandmother of my grandchildren.  My wife has had similar difficulties in finding other men to date.

I think there is hope for my wife and I getting together again, but it has not been easy.  I cross-dress daily just to stay awake to do my current part-time research work.  Cross-dressing seems to relieve my chronic ADD, drowsiness, and depression symptoms better than anything I have found that is not dangerous for me to take.   I do miss going out on the town occasionally, but I’ve lived for nearly 30 years in the same place where many LDS church members live.  I don’t pass well and am easily read by the many people in this area that know me.  Some saw me and told my ex-wife how awful they thought I looked.  I living where I currently live is like living in a fish bowl.   I can cross-dress only in private.  It’s a compromise or an accommodation that seems to work well for me and my community and church.

My views on Deuteronomy are a bit different than most.  The scripture says that men should not wear women’s clothing.  I feel that my brain was partially changed or feminized by intrauterine hormone exposure, which makes me feel something like a person with an intersex condition.  Part of me is female, so I qualify to wear women’s clothing.  My self-perceived gender is entirely male.  My sexual orientation is completely heterosexual, but I am aroused when I crossdress and imagine that I am a woman or at least partly female.  I have what Ann Lawrence would call partial heterosexual autogynephilia.  I would love to have long hair and female breasts and dress like a woman, but I love my male genitalia, am satisfied with breast prostheses, and can survive dressing only in private.   I cannot take testosterone for my testosterone deficiency because it makes my sleep apnea, cystic acne, blood pressure, and HDL levels worse.  I have also developed height loss due to estrogen deficiency and started taking 1 mg of estradiol a day.  It helps my sleep apnea, increases my HDL, and protects me from further height loss.  It also unexpectedly improves my libido.

The now widely accepted treatment of my partial heterosexual autogynephilic transvestism/transsexualism is self-acceptance.  This is hard for me because I am uncomfortable arousing myself by looking like an attractive–though conservatively and modestly dressed–female that is someone other than my wife, even for the purpose of relieving real and debilitating neuropsychiatric symptoms that have been made worse by very real, life-threatening cerebrovascular accidents and can be treated in no other way.   To keep my wife interested in me, I have not crossed in front of her at all and have sought to improve my self-presentation as an alpha male.  I am overweight but eat healthily and exercise fairly often.  I pray for spiritual guidance constantly, attend my church meetings, and read scripture daily.  I feel God’s love and the promptings of his Holy Spirit in my life.  This life experience has helped me develop compassion for all members of the LGBT community and others who find themselves persecuted and ostracized for whatever reason.  I love my church and find that the policies toward transsexuals are currently in transition.  Things are looking up.