How Admirers Come to Be

Linda goes back through her memory and emails to find and lay out what she has learned about those men commonly called admirers and how they are drawn to admiring t-girls/ crossdressers/trannies.

Setting the context: This article is going to be about how males known as admirers come to be attracted — sexually and sometimes romantically –- to males known as crossdressers.

‘That’s easy,’ you might say, ‘they are all homosexuals.’ It is not that easy because that is far from true.

Linda hugs an admirer in 2008.

Disclaimer: I write this not as a social scientist writing a scholarly paper using proven survey techniques that have been peer-reviewed by fellow scientists. I am a person with close to 50 years of experience as a crossdresser. As a male who crossdresses I define myself as one who enjoys dressing and appearing as a woman. In my case that also includes when appropriate adopting the mannerisms and social habits of women.

I think that goes for most who call themselves crossdressers but there is a big divide in our group as to how far we take that adoption of mannerisms and social habits.

It was around 1970 when I first learned from the World of Transvestism (There actually was a magazine of that name) that our transgender part of the world could roughly be divided into three groups — transexuals, drag queens and transvestites. I guessed I was meant to be slotted into the third group who were defined as men dressing usually partly as a woman for a brief period and for their own sexual pleasure. But that did not fit me. One fateful weekend in Toronto I had met men who enjoyed dressing as completely as women and some of them were extremely attractive. They were so attractive that I wanted to be like them. At the time there were several things that kept me apart. I could not afford to spend what they were spending on women’s clothing and accessories. I thought I could not take off my abundant body hair and unlike the t-girls I met that weekend I was not attracted to the idea of having sex with a man.

A few years later and in a different place I came across some adult bookstore literature that seemed to legitimize my place on the transgender spectrum. I came across the writings of Virginia Prince, information about the Beaumont Society in Britain, Seahorse Society in Australia and Society for a Second Self or Tri-Ess in America. They were using a new word called ‘crossdresser’. I liked that word for myself because it seemed to fit me more accurately in the transgender spectrum between transvestites who often dressed only partially and for fetishistic reasons and drag queens who dressed for show and for profit.

A couple of Linda’s acquaintance.

To Ms. Prince and the others the crossdresser was a heterosexual male who accepted for himself the complete image of a woman but did not want to be a woman or to be attracted to men. The Tri-Ess group had rules specifically barring homosexuals and homosexual activity from their midst. I was told this was to assure their wives that they were not all ‘closet queers’ as opposed I guess to ‘closet queens’.

As the years passed, I have met many, probably thousands, of other crossdressers. My impression is that for the most part it is true that most crossdressers are not gay and are not even interested in experimenting about sex with men. Wives reading this do not worry; if your husband says he wants to wear your lingerie but he is not gay the chances are he is telling you the truth. If he says he wants to dress fully as a woman and go out to a CD meeting but he is not gay then also chances are he is telling the truth.

However, if he tells you that he likes dressing as a woman and has from time to time been intimate with men then pretty well certainly, he is telling the truth. However, of all the crossdressers you might meet only a small fraction of them will belong to that latter group. It just so happens that I am one of that small fraction and yes, my partner knows it.

It is not my intention here to write about how I came to like being with admirers. I have already covered that in other articles. This time I want to review what I have learned about how some men come to admire us.

I can draw on years of experience meeting admirers at clubs like the Queen Mary (Los Angeles), Backstreet (Atlanta), The Cartwheel (New Hope, Pa.), Dufferin Tavern (Vancouver), Cleopatra’s/Disco Cleo (Montreal) and the Philbeach (London, U.K.). These all had in common that they were wonderful places for CDs and admirers to hook up. They now also have in common that they are all gone.

I also have a lot of experience from admirers I met up with and chatted with through a web service called the Craigslist Personals, sadly now also gone.

What did I learn from my admirers about how they came to be admirers? Those of you who have experience with casual dating of admirers will know that from most I learned nothing. Admirers are not a talkative lot and usually do not want to talk about their ‘real lives’. Flirt – sex — release and retreat is a common pattern.

Linda and an admirer in Palm Desert.

However, from time to time I came across real gems from whom I have been able to glean a lot of information about their lives and how they came to be in a situation of looking for t-girls like me. I like to chat and I like learning about the people I’m with and about their pasts. While sometimes women get jealous when learning about their partner’s sexual history, I am the opposite. It turns me on because I knew that recalling his pleasant sexual experiences will be a turn on for my partner of the moment.

Are you ready for it? Here are my top four ways admirers become admirers:

By chance: Let’s say you are visiting an unfamiliar city. You are there on business or part of a tour group. Perhaps you are a student at their university. Whatever the reason for some reason you will want to take a break, get out and explore. Let’s say that exploration takes you by the night life district or perhaps into the ‘gay village’. You hear music coming from a club or perhaps you see some pretty sexy looking women going in. You follow them in and to make a long story short you hook up with one of those sexy looking women. She’s nice. There is ‘something about her’. You decide to take the plunge and invite her back to your place or your hotel room. She agrees but there is something she must tell you first.

You are surprised to learn that she is transgender but still has her male ‘plumbing’ underneath. At this point you can either ‘cut and run’ or decide to carry through with your desire to be with her. After all, you reason, it is not like being with a real man and she has you so turned on. Soon you find yourself alone together. What you do and how you do it is up to you. You may not like it and if so that may be the end of your experience with TG sex. However, what if you liked it? What if she gives you a nice orgasm? That creates what psychologists will call a positive response. They also tell us that we will naturally want to get a repeat of the positive responses we get in life.

Many, so many, of my admirer friends told me that it was only by chance that they had a sexual encounter with a CD and after that first chance encounter they wanted more. Of course, I did not hear from those men who had a first encounter and then wanted no more. Nor did I hear from those who ran from their chance at an encounter.

Wannabe: I don’t want to give the impression that I am a slut who has had sex with thousands of men. My partners probably number less than 100 and I have done it all (ahem) in the name of clinical research. I’m assuming that the stories men tell me tend to be not true. Be assured I am filtering out the obvious lies to try to give you an accurate image of what makes and admirer. One group of admirers that tend not only to express the truth but also show it are those I call ‘wannabes’. They want to be crossdressers or used to be crossdressers but they are not dressing.

Some men just take a realistic view of their situation and put the desire to crossdress aside. It may be that their body just does not lend itself to the transformation. They may not have the financial means. They may be afraid of being outed. Whatever the reason for not dressing it does not diminish their desire to be part of the CD world. It seems being intimate with a CD helps those desires and who knows from time to time they may meet someone like me who will be glad to see them in some of my older outfits.

Curiosity: Have you ever read about something or some activity and wondered what it would be like to do it for yourself? Sky-diving, bungee jumping, mountain climbing: those are three activities that are definitely NOT on my what-if list.

However, I can recall meeting a few admirers who attest that the first thing that had drawn them to a ‘tranny club’ had been reading something about t-girls in a magazine such as Penthouse Digest or coming across some tranny material in an adult bookstore. ‘What would it be like?’ they think to themselves. ‘Why am I getting this erection?’ they might also ask.

Once a person has acted to satisfy his curiosity about what it would be like to be intimate with a crossdresser it is not difficult to get hooked. If you go into the relationship pre-disposed to arousal it is highly likely the arousal will happen and following arousal comes a euphoric release. Then you are hooked. Stimulus — response — reward: yes we’ve been down that road before.

If the curiosity driven search does not come to a satisfying conclusion, then the person is likely not to come back. No problem. There are a lot more fish in the sea and it will not be long before another swims by.

Imprinting: Are you familiar with the concept of imprinting? I swear I hadn’t heard or thought of it much in the last very many years, not since my college days where in a psychology class we were taught that birds imprint — gain their attraction — sexual and otherwise to the first thing they see when coming out of their shell. They had noticed this when pigeons hatched in a lab setting seemed to be overly attached to the lab person they saw as they came out of the shell.

Focus Linda. We are talking about admirers.

Imprinting came freshly back to mind when a few years ago an admirer friend told me the story of how he discovered that one of his close school friends was trans. (The friend has since had the gender reassignment and lives a highly successful life) To make a long story short the two friends became lovers with one always dressed as a girl when they were together. It was a two-year love affair. My friend says that he had no time, or was it energy, for other girlfriends. “By the end I was well and truly imprinted,” said my friend who has since married twice but has had a long and continuing succession of t-girl lovers. So, if one admirer was imprinted in that manner surely there must be others whose early sexual experiences were with t-girls and they liked the satisfaction. They apparently keep coming back for more.

That’s it: my four top reasons for admirers becoming admirers. I’m sure some among you will have other reasons you have discovered. If so, I would love to hear them.

By next time I plan to pull together a column on what it is admirers like about the t-girls they meet and what are their turn-offs, if any, about us t-girls. Would you like to contribute your views? Write to me at [email protected]

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Tags: admirers, crossdressing, featured

Category: crossdressing