This is interesting. As a social scientist, I tend to classify human behavior almost automatically. As I’ve participated here and dressed up more often, I’ve thought about the different “kinds” of dressers we all are. I came up with the same three categories as you.
What’s interesting, is that I think it can change for us over time.
When I was ten or so, if someone had come to me and said that I could be a beautiful woman when I grew up, I probably would have taken them up on the offer. It wasn’t that I felt “trapped” in a boy body, I think it was that as I hit puberty, my idea of beauty was very clearly feminine. So, if I wanted to be beautiful, I could only be a woman. I’m sure I would have ended up a lesbian, but I really wanted to look like what I saw on TV.
So, it overlapped with sexuality. As I grew and changed and became attracted to women, a lot of that desire manifested itself as wanting to look like what I found beautiful.
When I was first married, my only clothes were lingerie and so dressing up was very much connected to sexuality. As I got older and acquired more clothes, sexuality became less a part of it. Now, sexuality seems quite separate from my desire to dress up. It’s still there in the background, but it’s not the same.
Someone once said, it isn’t about experiencing sexual feelings, it’s about feeling sexy. Obviously there’s a bit of overlap there, but I think there’s an important difference. I expect it’s not unlike what GG feel when they take a bit of extra time to dress up. When a GG dresses up for a party or a night out, they do it because it’s fun to spend a bit of extra time making yourself look especially good. That’s the feeling I enjoy about dressing up the most. I like taking the time to look “special” for the day.
So, I guess at the end of it all I’m the kind of cross dresser who likes clothes. I’ve often thought of myself, not even as a cross dresser, but as someone with “non-binary fashion preferences), though that isn’t really accurate because I’m still binary, I just occupy both sides of the coin. I switch from one side to the other, but never mix. I guess another way of saying it is that I like to experience more than fifty percent of the available fashion options.
I am, and will probably always be a “guy in a dress,” but that’s ok as long as I can be a guy who looks really good in a dress.
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